In Self and Others, R. D. Laing uses confirmation to describe a response that recognises another person and engages with what they express. Confirmation can include disagreement. Disconfirmation concerns failures of recognition, including responses that acknowledge a person only within a role or identity imposed on them. The distinction is more precise than a contrast between kindness and unkindness.
Recognition in an actual relationship
Laing opens his chapter on confirmation and disconfirmation with Martin Buber’s account of people confirming one another through their encounters. He then stresses that total confirmation is an ideal rarely realised. In ordinary relationships, recognition is partial: a response may acknowledge some aspects of a person while overlooking or denying others. [1]
Confirmation begins with acknowledging that another person is there:
The slightest sign of recognition from another at least confirms one’s presence in his world.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 82 [1]
Confirmation can occur through speech, a gesture, a handshake or a responsive expression. What matters is the relationship between the person’s action and the response it receives. Does the response engage with the action and recognise its significance for that person? A warm tone alone does not answer this question. Nor does the fact that a reply produces pleasure or relief. [1]
This makes confirmation a relational concept. We cannot reliably identify it by compiling a list of phrases that always confirm or disconfirm. The same words may function differently according to what was said, how the interaction developed and what the people concerned understood.
Why disagreement can be confirmatory
Laing explicitly allows that a direct rejection can be confirmatory when it recognises the action or statement being rejected and treats it as significant. Agreement, gratification and recognition are therefore distinct. Someone may refuse a request while still engaging seriously with the person making it. Someone else may offer reassurance that avoids the concern altogether. [1]
Consider an invented example. A colleague says that a meeting left them feeling excluded. One response might acknowledge the concern, explain a different understanding of what happened, and invite discussion of the specific exchange. Another might reply with enthusiastic praise for the colleague’s work while ignoring the meeting. The first response can recognise the person despite disagreement. The second can sound supportive while leaving the original concern untouched.
This example illustrates the distinction; it is not a clinical case from Laing. It also does not show that every change of subject is a serious act of disconfirmation. People misunderstand, become distracted or lack time. The question concerns the response in context, including whether clarification and repair are possible.
Tangential responses
Laing discusses the tangential response using a concept he attributes to Jurgen Ruesch. Such a reply picks up something incidental to the initiating action while missing the intention that gives it significance. His example concerns a child showing his mother a worm: her reply focuses on the child’s dirtiness rather than his act of showing her what he has found. [1]
The significant point is not that the mother should approve of worms or abandon concerns about cleanliness. It is that her response changes the terms of the encounter. Laing then offers developmental and psychoanalytic interpretations of the example. Those interpretations should be distinguished from the more immediately observable mismatch between the child’s initiative and the reply. A single exchange cannot demonstrate a person’s developmental history.
Repeated interaction can matter differently from an isolated lapse. If a person’s initiatives are regularly redirected into an identity assigned by someone else, it may become difficult to bring a different aspect of themselves into the relationship. Laing is particularly concerned with this selective recognition, rather than simply an absence of attention. [1]
Pseudo-confirmation and the false self
Pseudo-confirmation is Laing’s term for acts that have the appearance of recognition while confirming a fiction about the person. The recognised identity may be a compliant or acceptable version of them. Initiative, disagreement or other aspects that do not fit the recognised version can receive a very different response. [1]
Confirmation is also specific to a relationship and to an aspect of the person:
An aspect of oneself negated by one person may be endorsed by another.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 83 [1]
Laing connects this with the false self. A person may receive sustained recognition for a way of being they themselves experience as false, while feeling anxiety or guilt when they depart from it. This helps explain why being praised or attended to does not necessarily mean feeling personally recognised. The relevant issue is what is being confirmed, and what happens to aspects of the person that fall outside it. [1]
In this chapter Laing also makes historical claims about family relationships and schizophrenia. These should be identified as his clinical and theoretical claims, not presented as established causal conclusions. He himself distinguishes examining confirmatory and disconfirmatory acts from deciding whether, or to what extent, they contribute to schizophrenia. [1]
The therapist’s contribution
One of Laing’s examples concerns his own attention during a session. After his mind wandered, the patient spoke as though he had become distant. He distinguishes acknowledging her feeling from acknowledging that she had accurately noticed his withdrawal. In his account, an interpretation of her sensitivity could have diverted attention from something he had actually done. [1]
The episode illustrates a problem for any relationship in which one person has interpretive authority. Describing the other person’s reaction can become a way of avoiding one’s own contribution. Laing’s account invites attention to that possibility. It does not imply that every perception of another person’s motives is accurate or that a therapist should affirm every interpretation offered to them.
Reading the concept carefully
Confirmation is most useful as a question about an exchange: what has been expressed, what has received recognition, and what has been passed over? It becomes less useful when turned into a fixed label for an entire person. Because recognition is partial and context-dependent, the same relationship may contain both confirmatory and disconfirmatory moments.
Related discussions appear in Self and Others explained, the false-self system, and mystification and invalidation. These concepts overlap, but they should not be treated as interchangeable names for any unhappy interaction.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 7, pp. 81–82; p. 82; chapter 7, p. 82; chapter 7, pp. 82–83; chapter 7, pp. 85–86; chapter 7, pp. 83–85; chapter 7, pp. 83–84; p. 83; chapter 7, pp. 87–88.