For R. D. Laing, collusion is a relationship in which people help sustain one another’s self-deception. In Self and Others, it concerns the identities participants need each other to confirm and the difficulties that arise when those identities are questioned. It is a more specific idea than cooperation, agreement or knowingly conspiring to deceive someone else.
A relationship organised around appearances
Laing defines collusion as a game of mutual self-deception involving two or more people. Participants may not fully recognise what they are doing; an important feature is that the arrangement is not acknowledged as a game. The concept therefore differs from a straightforward secret agreement whose participants understand its purpose. [1]
The mutual character of the arrangement is central to Laing’s definition:
The game is the game of mutual self-deception.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 90 [1]
His question is how a relationship can support an identity that someone needs to maintain without genuinely examining it. Recognition by another person gives the identity an appearance of reality. If that recognition depends on the other person adopting a corresponding role, the arrangement can become restrictive for both. [1]
This should not be taken to mean that every shared assumption is deceptive. People can confirm and complement each other without collusion. Laing begins his account by distinguishing those possibilities from counterfeit confirmation based on pretence. The issue is the particular relationship between what the participants sustain and what they can acknowledge. [1]
Needing the other person to be someone
Laing’s examples show how an apparently personal identity can depend on another person’s participation. Someone who needs to experience themselves as generous may also require the recipient to accept their generosity. A refusal can then be interpreted as the recipient’s inability to receive help, rather than as information about what they want. [1]
The conceptual point is the dependency between identities. One person’s desired position may require the other to be grateful, helpless, admiring or in need of correction. The pressure is not confined to how the first person thinks about the second. It can involve attempts to make the second person actually behave as the required complement. [1]
Laing distinguishes this from treating the other person merely as a surface on which to project a fantasy. In collusion, the other’s participation helps give the fantasy a shared, enacted form. That participation can make the arrangement harder to question, because an alteration in one person’s role threatens the identity the other has organised around it. [1]
An illustrative example
Consider an invented example of two colleagues. One needs to be the indispensable rescuer; the other needs to believe that every difficulty is beyond their own competence. Each completed rescue confirms both positions. If the second colleague solves a problem independently, the first dismisses the solution as unsafe. If the first offers ordinary cooperation, the second treats it as abandonment.
The example illustrates a possible pattern, not a diagnosis of either colleague. It would only support an interpretation of collusion if there were evidence that both sustained the arrangement and evaded contradictory information. Actual differences in skill, responsibility, resources or authority might explain much of the same observable behaviour. A convincing story about mutual dependence is not sufficient proof of mutual self-deception.
Nor does participation establish equal responsibility. Someone may have much less freedom to question an arrangement. Understanding what each person does requires attention to their options and to the consequences of refusing the expected role.
Collusion and coercion
Laing explicitly says that he will not call a relationship collusive when one person is predominantly the passive victim of manipulation. He also acknowledges how difficult the distinction can be in practice and gives an example of compliance under enslavement. His discussion places the concept beside serious questions about coercion, rather than resolving those questions through the word “mutual”. [1]
He also warns against treating the concept as an easy judgement about a couple:
It will be difficult in practice to determine whether or to what extent a relationship is collusive.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 90 [1]
A careful reading must preserve that difficulty. Apparent agreement may reflect fear, dependence or efforts to survive. Calling it collusion can conceal rather than explain the relationship if the observer assumes that both people freely chose it. The term needs evidence about participation, knowledge and constraint, not merely the observation that a pattern persists.
Laing also describes the conflict a person can experience when refusing the identity required by someone else. Refusal may bring guilt about failing the other; compliance may feel like self-betrayal. This is an account of a predicament, not a reason to assign blame to the person caught in it. [1]
Literature and clinical interpretation
Laing uses Sartre’s Huis Clos and Genet’s The Balcony to examine identities that depend on another person’s recognition or performance. These literary examples make the interdependence of roles particularly visible. They are interpretations of constructed dramatic situations, however, and should not be mistaken for independent clinical evidence. [1]
The chapter also considers the therapist’s place in a group. Laing argues that the therapist should avoid both entering the patients’ phantasy system and recruiting patients into the therapist’s own. He describes a group’s preoccupation with whether the therapist possesses the answer to their difficulties. Simply occupying the role of all-knowing rescuer, or its disappointing opposite, can preserve the underlying arrangement. [1]
This is Laing’s account of a therapeutic problem. It does not establish a standard technique or demonstrate treatment effectiveness. It does make the interpreter’s own position part of the inquiry: an explanation of collusion can itself become another role the participants are expected to accept.
Keeping the concept precise
The useful questions are specific. What identity does each person need the other to confirm? What happens when a participant acts outside the expected role? Which observations can be discussed, and which are repeatedly explained away? What freedom does each person have to refuse? These questions keep attention on the relationship without presuming its answer.
For the surrounding argument, see Self and Others explained, confirmation and disconfirmation, and the false-self system. Collusion concerns the mutual maintenance of an arrangement; those related concepts address different aspects of recognition and personal experience.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 8, p. 90; p. 90; chapter 8, pp. 91–93; chapter 8, p. 91; chapter 8, pp. 91–92; chapter 8, pp. 92–93; chapter 8, p. 93; chapter 8, pp. 93–94; chapter 8, pp. 105–106.