R. D. Laing asks how descriptions of a person can become demands about who they must be. In Self and Others, an attribution assigns qualities, feelings or intentions; an injunction directs conduct. The two can overlap when a statement about someone’s identity also determines what they are permitted or expected to do.
From describing someone to directing them
Laing opens his chapter on attributions and injunctions by observing that attributes place people in particular positions. A description can consequently have the force of an instruction. This need not involve an explicit command. It may work through an apparently settled account of the person’s motives, character or feelings. [1]
Laing opens the chapter by connecting a description with its interpersonal effect:
The attributes one ascribes to a person define him and put him in a particular position.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 132 [1]
There is a difference, for example, between an explicit request to help and a statement that someone is the kind of person who would never refuse. In the second case, refusing the request can appear to contradict the identity already assigned. This is an illustrative example, not a passage or case from Laing. It shows how a claim about identity can narrow the range of acceptable action.
Laing is not arguing that all descriptions are manipulative. His chapter says that attributions can facilitate as well as undermine the development of a workable sense of self. The issue is what a description does in a particular relationship and whether the person can question, qualify or reject it. [1]
Agreement and disagreement about identity
The attributes one person assigns may agree with, or diverge from, the recipient’s understanding of themselves. Laing calls these relations conjunctive and disjunctive. Disagreement alone does not settle whose account is more accurate: someone can be mistaken about themselves, misunderstood by another, or partly right in ways the exchange has not yet clarified. [1]
Some attributions can be investigated through evidence that others can assess. Broad judgments about a person’s worth or goodness are more difficult for the recipient to test independently, particularly when made by an authoritative adult to a child. Laing is concerned with the position from which someone is entitled to arbitrate and with the recipient’s ability to dispute that authority. [1]
The distinction is therefore about both meaning and relationship. The same description can have different force depending on who makes it, how much the other person depends on them and what follows from disagreement. A tentative interpretation and a verdict that cannot be challenged are not equivalent acts.
When another person defines your feelings
Laing contrasts responses that recognise another person’s expressed feeling with responses that replace it. In one of his examples, an adult insists that a child’s stated feeling is not what the child really feels. The apparent agreement that follows is then achieved by overruling the child’s testimony, rather than resolving the original difference. [1]
This argument does not require treating every self-report as infallible. People may be uncertain, conflicted or unable to describe an experience. The important difference is between investigating that uncertainty and deciding in advance that only the authorised account can be true. A relationship permits inquiry when both the description and its interpretation can remain open.
Laing also examines how repeated accounts of someone’s intentions can become entangled with the person’s own understanding. In his clinical example of Stephen, ordinary actions acquire meanings attributed by his mother, and he becomes unsure where his own motives begin and end. The episode is Laing’s interpretation of a particular history; it does not show that an observer can infer such a history from uncertainty about motives alone. [1]
Attributions conveyed through actions
An attribution need not be spoken. Laing’s account of Joan centres on a gift of a blouse that did not fit her body or preferences. Within the relationship he describes, she experiences the mismatch as a failure in herself: she should have fitted the gift and the image of her that it embodied. The act carries both an attribution and an implied requirement. [1]
The question is what an attribution does within the relationship:
Attributions facilitate or undermine development of a feasible sense of self.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 134 [1]
The example depends on its relational context. An unsuitable present, considered on its own, would not establish an attempt to control someone’s identity. Laing’s interpretation concerns what the gift means within a broader pattern and how the recipient experiences the options available to her. Separating the observable event from the proposed interpretation makes the analysis more accountable.
Ordinary ambiguity and disavowed meanings
Everyday language routinely carries more than its literal statement. A comment about temperature may also be a request to shut a window. Laing explicitly recognises that honest exchanges can contain many such resonances. Ambiguity alone is not his criterion for a damaging relationship. [1]
His concern is a different pattern: implications are conveyed but cannot be openly acknowledged. If the listener responds to the implication, they are accused of inventing it; if they respond only to the literal words, they are accused of refusing to understand. The difficulty is not simply decoding a hidden message. It is that the participants cannot establish a dependable way of discussing what the exchange means. [1]
Even here, interpretation requires care. A listener’s suspicion that a statement contains a threat does not prove the threat was intended. A denial does not automatically establish deliberate deception. The sequence of actions, the surrounding relationship and the possibility of clarification matter more than a single sentence considered in isolation.
Intention, effect and responsibility
Laing asks how to distinguish what someone intends, what they do and what another person experiences as its effect. He considers situations in which a person is distressed by an action that was not intended to distress them, and situations in which the intended effect does not occur. These questions complicate simple statements that one person has made another feel or become something. [1]
Keeping the distinctions visible does not remove responsibility for conduct. It makes the claim more precise: an interpretation of motive, an account of an action and evidence of an effect require different kinds of support. Collapsing them can turn an explanation of a relationship into another unchallengeable attribution.
For related concepts, see confirmation and disconfirmation, mystification and invalidation, and Self and Others explained. Together they show why Laing treats the power to define a person’s experience as part of the relationship itself.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 10, p. 132; p. 132; chapter 10, pp. 132–134; chapter 10, pp. 132–133; chapter 10, pp. 134–135; chapter 10, pp. 133–134; p. 134; chapter 10, pp. 139–140; chapter 10, pp. 140–141; chapter 10, p. 136.