R. D. Laing’s existential phenomenology asks what a person’s world is like from within it. In The Divided Self, an action is understood in relation to the person’s fears, intentions, relationships and sense of existence. This approach supplies a way of investigating meaning. It does not, by itself, establish the causes of a psychiatric condition or the effectiveness of a treatment.
What Laing means by existential phenomenology
The opening chapter of The Divided Self describes an attempt to place particular experiences within the context of a person’s whole way of being in the world. Laing is interested in how someone experiences both themselves and their surroundings: whether other people feel accessible or threatening, whether the body feels inhabited or remote, and whether ordinary participation seems possible. These are questions about the organisation of experience, rather than a list of symptoms considered separately. [1]
Laing defines the task in terms of lived experience:
Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person’s experience of his world and himself.
R. D. Laing — The Divided Self, p. 17 [1]
The word existential directs attention towards the person’s manner of existing: their separateness and relationships, bodily presence, possibilities and vulnerability. Phenomenological identifies the effort to describe how the situation is experienced. Laing’s aim is to make apparently incomprehensible behaviour intelligible by reconstructing the world in which it occurs. A description of what an observer sees may be accurate while leaving that world largely unexplored. [1]
Laing also states that his book is not a direct application of any established existential philosophy. He acknowledges points of both agreement and disagreement with the philosophers and clinicians he names. Reading him as simply applying Sartre or Heidegger would therefore obscure the particular argument he makes. [1]
Beginning with a person in a world
Laing objects to descriptions that begin by separating a person into abstract components and then try to reconstruct their life from those components. His criticism extends to language that treats mind, body or mental structures as if each could first be understood in isolation. He proposes beginning with the person already involved with other people and a world. [1]
This starting point changes the questions an interpreter asks. Silence, for example, is an observable absence of speech. Its place in a person’s life remains open to investigation. It might involve fear, protest, uncertainty, exhaustion or something the observer has not anticipated. These are illustrative possibilities, not conclusions that Laing’s method permits us to impose. Understanding requires learning how this particular situation is experienced.
The method therefore calls for more than sympathetic imagination. An explanation that sounds convincing to the observer still needs to be checked against the person’s words, conduct and circumstances. Laing’s own account emphasises the need to orient oneself within the other person’s frame of reference without immediately deciding whose understanding must be correct. [1]
Person and organism: two kinds of question
Laing illustrates a difference between seeing someone as a person and studying them as an organism. He uses the ambiguous image that can appear as a vase or two faces: the same configuration supports different ways of seeing. Likewise, attending to someone’s intentions and investigating physiological processes disclose different aspects of the same human being. He explicitly rejects the idea that this requires two separate substances, mind and body. [1]
He presents a difference in the observer’s orientation, not two separate kinds of human being:
In particular, man can be seen as person or thing.
R. D. Laing — The Divided Self, p. 20 [1]
His example of speech makes the distinction precise. Understanding what someone is saying does not explain the biological processes involved in speaking. Explaining those processes does not supply the meaning of the utterance. Neither account can simply be substituted for the other. Laing’s objection concerns the loss of personal meaning when a description presented as an understanding of a person becomes exclusively an account of impersonal processes. [1]
This passage matters when assessing claims that Laing dismissed biology altogether. The argument here is about the question being investigated and the kind of answer appropriate to it. His original preface explicitly says that the book does not explore constitutional and organic aspects or offer a comprehensive theory of schizophrenia. Those exclusions define the scope of the book; they do not demonstrate that the excluded factors are unimportant. [1]
The observer belongs to the situation
In the second chapter, Laing draws attention to the psychiatrist’s presence within the situation being described. The patient’s behaviour may partly respond to the interviewer’s manner, expectations and actions. An interview is an encounter involving both people, rather than a setting in which one person displays an entirely independent specimen of behaviour. [1]
Laing develops this point through a clinical demonstration reported by Emil Kraepelin. He proposes that the patient’s apparently disconnected speech can also be heard as a response to being questioned and exhibited before students. This is Laing’s interpretation of a published account, not an interview he conducted himself. Its value lies in opening an additional question about the interaction; it does not establish that every element of the patient’s condition is explained by that interaction. [1]
Understanding without assuming certainty
The approach has an important discipline built into it: the observer’s account and the person’s experience are not identical. A description of experience is not automatically a complete causal explanation. A meaningful interpretation of an action does not prove that the interpreter has discovered its only meaning. These distinctions help prevent an effort to understand from becoming another authoritative account imposed on someone.
Laing’s criticism of depersonalising theory should also be read alongside his demand for an unbiased study of persons. Attending to someone personally does not mean treating the observer’s intuition as unquestionable. The difficulty is to investigate without allowing a preferred conceptual scheme to decide in advance what the person must be experiencing. [1]
For a fuller account of the book, see The Divided Self explained. Its descriptions of ontological insecurity and the embodied and unembodied self show how these methodological commitments shape Laing’s clinical interpretations. The wider R. D. Laing collection places them alongside his work on relationships and psychotherapy.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. References use the Pelican edition, Penguin Books, 1970 reprint.Cited: chapter 1, pp. 17–18; p. 17; chapter 1, pp. 17–18, 25–26; preface to the original edition, p. 9; chapter 1, pp. 19–20; chapter 1, pp. 25–26; chapter 1, pp. 20–22; p. 20; chapter 1, pp. 21–23; chapter 2, p. 28; chapter 2, pp. 29–30; chapter 1, pp. 24–26.