Laing’s discussion of unconscious phantasy asks how experience can shape a person’s life without being recognised for what it is. The opening chapters of Self and Others investigate the idea rather than simply adopting a psychoanalytic definition. They also ask a difficult question of the interpreter: on what grounds can one person claim to know an experience that another person does not acknowledge?
Why begin with phantasy?
Laing starts with distinctions among remembering, dreaming, imagining and perceiving. Psychoanalysis adds unconscious phantasy, but its status needs clarification. Is it a kind of experience, a process proposed to explain experience, or something an observer infers from another person’s conduct? These alternatives have different implications. [1]
His starting point is Susan Isaacs’s account of phantasy, which he presents as an influential formulation of the Kleinian position. He is not claiming to have invented the concept. His contribution here is to examine what happens when its theoretical vocabulary is tested against questions about experience, inference and communication. [1]
This page retains the spelling phantasy used in Self and Others. In this discussion it cannot be reduced to a consciously invented daydream. What matters is how a person experiences something and whether they recognise the character of that experience.
The interpreter makes two inferences
When an analyst attributes an unconscious phantasy to someone, Laing identifies two steps. The analyst infers something about the person’s experience, and also infers that the person is unaware of it. The second claim can make disagreement difficult to evaluate: the person’s inability to confirm the interpretation may already have been built into the theory. [1]
Laing makes the epistemic problem concrete before developing it further:
An adult infers what a baby experiences. The baby does not tell us.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 6 [1]
Laing is not suggesting that interpretation can be avoided. Understanding another person always involves going beyond one’s direct observation of their actions. His concern is what warrants the particular inference and what could count against it. A confident explanation is not made more secure simply by adding an account of why its recipient cannot recognise it.
He later describes the circular danger explicitly. If rejecting the interpretation proves unconsciousness, while accepting it can be dismissed as superficial insight, the interpreter has made the claim difficult to challenge under any circumstances. [1]
Being unaware of the character of an experience
Laing distinguishes a hypothetical mechanism outside experience from a person’s failure to recognise an aspect of their own experience. The latter does not require picturing a second hidden observer inside the person. Someone can be involved in imagining, remembering and perceiving without being equally aware of how those activities enter the present encounter. [1]
Here unconsciousness concerns the character attributed to an experience, not simply its complete absence from awareness:
This is one sense in which we are unconscious of our experience. We misconstrue it.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 8 [1]
Consider an invented example. A colleague gives a brief reply to a question. The listener experiences it as contempt, already anticipates humiliation and responds defensively. Later, they notice how much of the encounter was organised by remembered criticism and imagined consequences. The reply happened; its whole meaning was not supplied by the reply alone.
This example illustrates a distinction, not a diagnosis. The colleague might actually have been contemptuous. An interpretation of phantasy must leave room for investigation of the other person’s conduct. Otherwise it can become a convenient way of discounting a justified complaint.
Experience is not a container of objects
Laing challenges theoretical language that treats mind as a literal inner container and experience as traffic between separate mental and physical compartments. When those divisions are assumed at the outset, concepts such as projection or conversion can appear to solve problems partly produced by the vocabulary itself. [1]
He proposes attending more carefully to the distinctions being made. Dreaming and waking perception are modes of experience. Feeling that something is real is a quality that may accompany different modes. Calling something private, public, inner or outer introduces further questions; these terms cannot simply be substituted for one another. [1]
A dream can feel compelling while it occurs without becoming a publicly observable event. Conversely, a public event can be experienced differently by those present. Laing’s framework helps specify these differences without making the intensity of conviction sufficient proof of an interpretation.
Phantasy can be sustained between people
The discussion moves from one person to social phantasy systems. Laing draws on Bion’s account of being drawn into a role within a group, temporarily finding one’s reactions entirely justified by the situation and only later recognising the pattern. The interpreter is susceptible to participation too. [1]
A shared framework can supply belonging, identity and an apparently obvious account of events. Its participants need not experience it as imaginary. Laing argues that this helps explain why questioning a family’s shared understanding may be experienced as a threat to the relationship itself. [1]
Agreement does not prove that a shared account is false. Nor does dissent prove that the dissenter has escaped illusion. The task remains to investigate what each person experiences, what they do, which assumptions are shared and whether the participants can discuss conflicting evidence.
What this explains—and what remains open
Laing connects these arguments with the intelligibility of experiences described as psychotic. At points he interprets unusual expressions as partial recognition of an alienated social situation. Those are historical interpretive claims, not grounds for treating a particular belief about persecution or control as fact. [1]
The enduring methodological issue is how to take experience seriously while keeping interpretations answerable to evidence. Laing’s criticism applies to his own formulations as well as those he challenges. A claim about hidden phantasy needs more than the interpreter’s conviction.
For related discussions, see collusion, attributions and injunctions, false and untenable positions and Self and Others explained.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 1, pp. 3–7; chapter 1, pp. 3–5; chapter 1, pp. 5–7; p. 6; chapter 2, pp. 23–24; chapter 1, pp. 7–8, 16–17; p. 8; chapter 1, pp. 9–12; chapter 1, pp. 11–12; chapter 2, pp. 18–22; chapter 2, pp. 22–23; chapter 2, pp. 24–26; chapter 2, pp. 24–27.