Laing’s internalised family is a pattern of relationships carried into a person’s experience. It concerns who belongs with whom, who is excluded, what happens when someone moves closer or further away, and how familiar sequences recur. In The Politics of the Family, he distinguishes the actual family from the “family” as an internalised structure that can shape memories, dreams, expectations and later relationships.
Relations are internalised, not just people
Laing begins by warning against easy generalisations about families across cultures and historical periods. His subject is a particular process: the family of origin is transformed through internalisation and other operations, then mapped back onto the family and other situations. The quotation marks around “family” identify that transformed structure. [1]
Laing summarises the object of internalisation as a relational pattern:
To summarize: what is internalized are not objects as such but patterns of relationship by internal operations upon which a person develops an incarnate group structure.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, p. 8 [1]
The decisive point is relational. A person does not simply acquire separate inner pictures of mother, father or siblings. What is carried forward includes relations of closeness and distance, alliances and divisions, and the person’s own place among them. These patterns also unfold in time: who approaches, who withdraws, who intervenes and what happens next. [1]
This changes the question from which parental figure someone resembles to what arrangement is being repeated or transformed. The same apparent role can have different meanings within different sequences. Understanding the pattern requires more than identifying a single familiar person.
What internalisation means here
Laing describes internalisation as a transfer between modes of experience, including perception, memory, imagination and dreams. The content can change while a recognisable relational structure remains. A sequence encountered in waking life may return in a dream whose characters and setting look quite different. [1]
He is describing transformations in experience, not the literal movement of a household into someone’s head. His language of mapping asks what is preserved, what changes and how a pattern is carried from one context into another. The mapping is an interpretation to be examined, not a guarantee that every resemblance reveals a hidden family origin.
Laing also emphasises that the internal family is not necessarily the only or most significant organising pattern in a person’s life. People participate in many social settings, and carry different modes of relationship between them. His account allows for plurality rather than reducing the whole person to one childhood scene. [1]
The family shared inside its members
The argument becomes more complex when each person expects the others to share the same sense of belonging. It is not only that I experience us as a family. I also expect you to experience us that way, and may depend on believing that you do. Laing describes this reciprocal inclusion as a way a group sustains its unity. [1]
That unity can be expressed through images. Laing gives an account of a family imagined as a flower, with a mother at its centre and children as petals. The image conveys a particular experience of membership and separation. It is evidence about the account being given, rather than an objective diagram of every relationship in the household. [1]
When belonging depends on a shared internal picture, changing one’s understanding may disturb other members even without a physical departure. This helps explain why a new relationship, independent decision or changed account of the past can acquire significance beyond the immediate event.
Repeated scenarios and changed positions
Laing’s account includes reversals and transformations. A person can try to control a later situation by doing what was once done to them, yet continue to experience the result through an earlier position of helplessness. In one clinical narrative, he distinguishes the sequence of the adult’s actions from the way the adult experiences their meaning. [1]
As an invented illustration, imagine someone who previously served as a go-between during family arguments. In a later friendship group, they assume that others will not speak directly and volunteer to carry every message. Their actions may help reproduce the arrangement they expected. This is one possible interpretation; practical circumstances or the actual conduct of the friends may provide other explanations.
The concept is strongest when it generates questions about a sequence that can be investigated. It is weaker when resemblance is taken as proof. Laing himself says that psychoanalytic inquiry alone cannot establish the extent of these operations: study of actual families must accompany study of internalised ones. [1]
The tennis-ball account
Laing illustrates the idea through Jane, a young person he describes as profoundly withdrawn and preoccupied with an imagined game of mixed doubles. She identifies with elements of the game, especially the ball. In his account, two opposing family alliances use her to relay messages when they refuse direct communication. The tennis image makes the intermediary position intelligible. [1]
He reports that she later recognised connections, left the household and became active in the wider world. This remains a clinical narrative selected and interpreted by Laing. It supports discussion of the meaning he found in one case; it does not establish a general causal explanation or demonstrate which intervention produced the later outcome.
Protection, constraint and the limits of the claim
The internalised family may help a person feel coherent and secure. Laing also describes how preserving it can become a demand imposed on others: each person is expected to retain a common picture so that the others’ worlds remain intact. He calls attention to defences conducted through other people, not solely within an individual. [1]
His opening discussion of family dynamics includes a qualification that applies to wider uses of the concept:
comparisons and generalizations must be very tentative.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, p. 3 (excerpt) [1]
His concluding qualification is explicit. Observing relatively closed family systems among people diagnosed with schizophrenia is different from asserting that those families cause schizophrenia. The distinction rules out using this concept to assign a diagnosis or blame relatives from a suggestive story alone. [1]
For Laing, the family carried in experience can become a way of seeing every later situation. Examining that pattern means asking how it fits the present, where it fails and what other relationships are possible. Read further in The Politics of the Family explained, collusion and attributions and injunctions.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1971). The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. References use the Routledge 1999 reprint of the 1971 edition; first publication recorded as 1969.Cited: “The Family and the ‘Family’”, p. 3; p. 8; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 4–6; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 7–8; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 12, 18; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 4–5; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, p. 6; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 10–11; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, p. 9; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 15–17; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, pp. 12–14; p. 3; “The Family and the ‘Family’”, p. 18.