In Self and Others, Laing uses elusion for a form of self-deception in which someone moves away from an uncomfortable position and then appears to return without undoing that movement. The result resembles authenticity while leaving the original difficulty unresolved. His subject is the relationship between experience, pretence and the ways a person understands their own participation.
Why pretence is more complicated than lying
A lie usually involves a distinction between what someone believes and what they tell another person. Laing’s discussion goes further: someone can become entangled in a role or representation without straightforwardly acknowledging it as pretence. The person’s own experience of what they are doing becomes part of the difficulty. [1]
This is the concise formulation at the heart of elusion:
A double pretence simulates no pretence.
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 30 [1]
He opens the chapter with Sartre’s account of a waiter performing the role of waiter. Laing’s interest is in the distance between being a person who carries out a role and treating that role as a complete definition of oneself. This page follows the passage as Laing presents it; it does not offer an independent account of Sartre’s full argument. [1]
Ordinary role-playing, imagination and tact are not thereby exposed as pathological. The question is whether someone can recognise the role as a role and acknowledge the experience or conflict it helps them evade.
The movement away and the apparent return
Laing describes elusion as a double movement. A person first moves from an original position into a pretended one, then makes another movement that resembles a return. The second movement leaves the first intact. His notation distinguishes the original position, A, from the apparent return, A1. [1]
For Laing, the apparent return does not undo the original movement away:
The only way to ‘realize’ one’s original state is to forgo the first pretence
R. D. Laing — Self and Others (second edition), p. 30 (excerpt) [1]
| Moment | What changes |
|---|---|
| Original position | A feeling, commitment or conflict is present. |
| Movement away | The person adopts a position through which that difficulty is evaded. |
| Apparent return | The original position is represented again, without the underlying evasion being acknowledged. |
This table simplifies Laing’s scheme. It describes a possible organisation of experience, not a test that can reveal another person’s hidden motives. An observer must still establish what the person experiences and what evidence supports the proposed sequence.
Jill’s unresolved marriage
Laing’s example of Jill concerns someone who does not want to be married to Jack but is afraid to leave. She attempts to deal with the predicament through imagining herself not married, and then through an imagined restoration of the marriage. The movement changes the experienced situation without resolving the practical conflict around staying and leaving. [1]
The point is not simply that Jill has mixed feelings. Ambivalence can be acknowledged directly. Elusion concerns the additional operation through which a person avoids inhabiting that ambivalence and then treats a representation of the situation as though the evasion had been overcome.
A more ordinary invented illustration would be someone who withdraws emotionally from a difficult friendship, then adopts an elaborate performance of closeness while avoiding any discussion of the withdrawal. The performance may be sincerely felt at moments. Establishing elusion would require more than observing politeness or uncertainty; it would require evidence about the unresolved conflict and the person’s relation to it.
Living in anticipation or reconstruction
Laing connects elusion with ways of living ahead of, or behind, an encounter. Someone may anticipate its fulfilment so fully that the actual meeting becomes secondary. Alternatively, the person may reconstruct an encounter afterwards and experience feelings in relation to that reconstruction. The imagined other can become easier to possess than the actual other, who can respond independently. [1]
In the narrative of Yvette, Laing describes intense emotion around an anticipated separation, a quieter response when the separation occurs, and a later reconstruction of the past. The distinction concerns what an emotion is directed towards and when it is experienced. It does not make the emotion unreal. [1]
This interpretation should not be converted into a timetable for correct feeling. Delayed emotion, anticipation or an unexpected response to loss does not by itself establish self-deception. Laing supplies a particular reading of a sequence; resemblance alone cannot confirm the same explanation elsewhere.
How this differs from the divided self
Laing compares this account with The Divided Self. In the earlier book, inward withdrawal can function as protection against threats to a precarious sense of existence. In the elusion chapter, the focus shifts towards sincerity, pretence and the difficulty of acknowledging one’s situation. These concerns can overlap, but they do not identify the same problem. [1]
Phantasy is also broader than elusion. It concerns modes and functions of experience, including what someone does not recognise about them. Elusion describes a particular evasive movement. Collusion adds the question of how people sustain self-deception together.
The limits of judging authenticity
The chapter uses historical clinical language and makes interpretive claims that require caution. Its concluding discussion allows even an admission of pretence to become another possible pretence. That creates a serious methodological problem: an interpreter can become impossible to contradict if every answer is taken as further evidence of evasion. [1]
A careful use of the concept therefore keeps the interpretation open to correction. It cannot establish that distress is feigned, invalidate a report of suffering, or authorise someone to claim privileged access to another person’s authentic self. Its useful question is more modest: what difficulty remains unaddressed beneath an apparently restored situation?
Read alongside the false-self system and false and untenable positions for the related distinctions.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others. Revised second edition. Pantheon Books.Cited: chapter 3, pp. 29–30; p. 30; chapter 3, p. 29; chapter 3, pp. 30–31; chapter 3, p. 32; chapter 3, pp. 33–34; chapter 3, pp. 34–35; chapter 3, pp. 35–36; chapter 3, pp. 37–38.