Added: 3 years ago
From: Geoff31858
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  • I don't have time to get into all the intricate tangents one can go off on in discussing every single point of this video, but 1 thing is obvious to me from experience: I have never seen a marriage yet that has been a happy one. On the surface it may seem so,but when you spend time with a couple or family extreme dysfunctions start showing themselves. It's all about control, yes,& the more narcissistic people become, the more unbending the marriage demands become toward ea. other. Hence: Divorce

  • I agree with Laing.... wise man.

  • Laing, while brilliant, became a victim of the very "rules" that he sought to expose. Only, the "rules" that he succumbed to were those of "breakthrough analysis". In other words, you can't be exceptional without being audacious. Objective analysis is boring. Saying something OUTLANDISH - now that makes a mark. An average psychologist can become instantly famous by declaring that the rules of prismic color separation are too restricting on the human consciousness. We need crystal dodecahedrons.

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  • @BBCater IMO Saying something 'OUTLANDISH' as you describe is no different to making tins of Spaghetti in animal shapes so that kids eat them or getting a tattoo to be fashionable and 'in'.

    Truth is truth and, whether boring or not to the listener, truth has no need for an outlandish remark to get attention because truth will already capture those who are open to it and that is not boring at all. I find Laing's findings extremely interesting.

  • Humans, animals and fish have BEHAVIORS - both on the personal and collective levels. To even SUGGEST some "dark arena" in the family environment is so over-reaching that it's laughable, as soon as you get over the star-struck impact of "it's Laing".

    Every popular psychologist winds up having the epiphone that "GOOD things are really BAD things". Well, what do they propose? That the "nest" is oppressive, while the "wild" is liberation? Apply that logic to a baby bird. The outcome is certain.

  • the soul purpose of psychiatry IS social engineering. By the casting out of those deemed undesirable to society by THAT societies rules and definition of illness ( ICD for EU and DSM for US )it cant be seen as anything other than Political and has no consideration or concern for the individual or the health there of. And has, arguably, in fact been more detriMENTAL than beneficial more often than not, and certainly to often to be considered a suitable profession in aid of mental health

  • This may be from the documentary, "The Century of Self". I recognize the voice of the narrator as the fellow you made the excellent documentary, on government paranoia, arms-races, and todays "war on terror",  "The Power of Nightmares."

  • This alluding to Frederick Hayek, and the Austrian school of economists, is the very thing I am talking about when speaking of the metaphysical inanity of this so-called cultural revolution vis a vis institutional psychiatry. There is, in my estimation, absolutely no parallel that may be drawn between the Laing and the likes of Hayek! Any similarities arise through contrivance and mere coincidence! There is nothing individualistic about Laing! His was antithetical to an open and free society.

  • Is this from Asylum, 1972? Anyways, could anyone send me a link (bittorrent, RS, etc) where I can find it? cheers!

  • I feel that this is a gross misrepresentation of where Laing was really coming from. It emphasises some things whilst omitting others. Ronnie Laing was above all else a man who had suffered and felt great compassion for the suffering of others. Yes, he was a political animal, but he also comes across as a natural healer who never lost hope. This is not really conveyed in this clip.

  • @ktbalin Compassion for the suffering of others?! Bullshit! He was, above all else, a shameless, self-promoting and Marxist-inspired, anti-individualist. He simply took the liberty of crediting himself with the reinvention of psychiatry. The fact that so few actually have the timerity to call a spade a spade, and to come clean with Laing's career-and personal life-of deceit and lies, speaks volumes of his "success" from the grave. Sycophancy does not unearth the truth, it only blurs it.

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  • @ktbalin

    Completely agree, Curtis twists Laing's ideas to fit his own theory, very cheap and amateurish.

  • T. Szasz's "Anti-psychiatry: quackery squared". If psychiatry has assumed its place as a medical specialty, then, being a "political animal" is not consistent with medical treatment. Psychiatry is informed by the idea that in altering the individual one will alter the social. The latter is an ideology that has come to be embraced in most walks of secular life. The church and state has been supplanted by the therapeutic state; and "mind" has supplanted that of the care and concern of men's souls.

  • He was quite nuts you know.!!

  • haha the most ridiculous portrayal of Laing I've ever seen. thank you youtube.

  • This is from a very paranoid documentary. A cheaply cut attempt at attention seeking dramatisation, it connects and juxtaposes piecemeal, in an absurd and frenetic way. Ronnie would surely laugh. He was more human and humane than you will ever know.

  • @morrismosart Certainly human; humane in starts and fits, but a personal and professional failure.

  • Defining love a semantic nightmare, being-as it appears- to embrace , needs, desires attitudes. beliefs, expectancies, compassion, empathy and altruism.. Laing rightly points to the primacy of self interest in relationships and that to promote other concerns and attributes to

    the equation is speculative. He also rightly

    stresses the enormous impact of individual experience and "brainwashing"

    in determining what one may regard as madness and another a struggle to

    attain freedom and justice.

  • The Trap, ep 2

    Documentary by Adam Curtis

  • Is there more to this? The ending about the convergence of Laingian theory and right-wing libertarianism is interesting. What is this from?

  • Trust no-one, especially those who say they love you. Oh so true! Great vid.

  • Laing was a genius. Thanks for the post

  • @DrMontague Read "Anti-psychiatry: Quackery squared", and see what his life might have to say about your uncritical sycophancy.

  • @whiff1962 I am well read on most perspectives in the social sciences., therefore I am not arguing out of ignorance. It's my opinion. One critique of Laing is that that he sees the family behaviour turning a family member into a schizophrenic. It has been argued that the schizophrenic might be shaping the behaviour of the family members! Laing took on the establishment, he was not simply a conservative psychiatrist. trying to make his patients fit into an unjust world of exploitation!

  • Vugar marxism. I see that your last comment is no less a veiled epithet leveled against Thomas Szasz. Laing did not "take on" the establishment, he was his own. Sorry, but there is nothing liberating about your ilk, with your cynicism and willy-nilly, bombastic iconoclasms. My local university library has some twenty titles on schizophrenia, alone. And you maintain that the huckster, Laing, had some privileged insight? Laing was no reformer, he was a charlatan and showman.

  • @DrMontague Psychiatry works because so many refuse to admit the costs associated with freedom. From the little you proffer in this exchange, I gather that your personal politics figures importantly in your conceptualization of madness. I hold to the gold standard of the Virchowian disease model, something to which ALL forms of mental illness do not-and cannot-conform. My critique is of a profession claimng itself as a branch of medicine, but in truth, principally a moral-legalistic enterprise.

  • @whiff1962 Laing argued how an insane world deemed those who could not tolerate it any more as insane. E.g. If you couldn't face working factory you would be sent to the asylum.. Laing turned against his own profession i.e. the conservative psychiatric establishment. What the profession considered to me mental illness Laing consider it to be a journey, the mind healing itself against an appalling state of affairs called normality.

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  • If by "conservative" one means liberal psychiatry, then yes, the profession serves the status quo. The present discourse and praxis of psychiatry is of the liberal-statist bent. I would suggest you peruse Szasz's "Law, liberty, and psychiatry", to see how coercion is called cure, and oppressive, treatment.-within a liberal statist rubric-as in the "right to treatment" law, and the "community mental health movement" : Liberal-statist, collectivist, and fundamentally anti-individualistic.

  • @whiff1962 1. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

  • 2.Laing is regarded as an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper, though he never denied the value of treating mental distress. He challenged the core values of a practice of psychiatry which he thought considered mental illness as a biological phenomenon without regard for social, intellectual and cultural dimensions.

  • @DrMontague @DrMontague So, apologetics aside, how do forms of psychiatric violence square with the treatment of these existential expressions of a sane person in an insane world, unless of course, Laing always harbored regrets for having left "mainstream" psychiatry? Laing was as much a failure as a doctor as he was a radical, Marxist "soul doctor". He did not turn against the psychiatric profession, he maintained in his practice many of its bag of tricks, like chemical assault (Clancy Sigal).

  • Enlarge your perspective, if you do have the timerity to do so. Your wrongheaded view of psychiatry as "conservative", although in its aims and motives this is true enough, is no less presently informed by do-gooder, left-leaning collectivists, as yourself. In short, much of psychiatry, certainly involuntary "treatments", are antithetical to the principles of liberty and freedom so cherished in an open and free society. However, psychiatry, for now, has effected a propagandistic tour de force.

  • @whiff1962 You are pig headed ignorant. You will get no more debate from me.

  • @DrMontague Mutatis mutandis.

  • @DrMontague This is not what I call good science or medicine. This whole mess of mixing the metaphorical, with the medical, as pleased Laing, is the very thing you tout as a great breakthrough? By most accounts, Laing was an accomplished metaphysician and quack.

  • @DrMontague In all this, one salient question does come to the fore. If Laing's conception of madness was not principally and purely medical, then why did he insist on the use of established psychiatric treatments for a so-called existential reaction, i.e. mental illness? This is but one lapse in Laing's constancy and consistency as a "renegade" shrink. Are you actually a Ph.D or medical doctor?

  • "If you couldn't face working factory you would be sent to the asylum.": How many individuals get locked up for this? Perhaps in Soviet Russia. Western psychiatry has always been keen on exposing the "excesses" and "malpractice" of psychiatry abroad, while refusing to pluck the mote from its own eye. Psychiatry is our culture's social and political tranquilizer; and its practitioner, the social engineer who is tasked with dispensing its treatment: alter the individual and you alter the social.

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  • @DrMontague This was never a discussion in the first place, but one of apparent proselytizing on behalf of the dead. I do wonder why Laing insisted on the use of coercions. Might this have been a means of defusing would-be critics and of stilling any skepticism? If you, yourself, were not so caught up in your Marxist ideology over psychiatry's rightful place in our culture, you might have well focused on our commonalities, rather those apparent differences. What I have said is true and factual.

  • Am I tripping balls, or in the background at 5:07 is that Alan Watts? ? ? ?

  • I don't know. Could be.

  • Tripping balls??

  • @ReflectedFlicks, lol, it does look like him doesn't it.

  • @ReflectedFlicks

    I swear it is!

  • @ReflectedFlicks It is.

  • @ReflectedFlicks  Yes, it is. :)

  • Great computers. Nice trip to the late 60s/early 70s. Game theory=human nature? Interesting video

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