Dr. Laing's first purpose is to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. In this, with case studies of schizophrenic patients, he succeeds brilliantly, but he does more: through a vision of sanity and madness as 'degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent' he offers a rich existential analysis of personal alienation.
The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as 'real'. He invents a false self and with it he confronts both the outside world and his own despair. The disintegration of his real self keeps pace with the growing unreality of his false self until, in the extremes of schizophrenic breakdown, the whole personality disintegrates.
The Divided Self
Preface to the Original Edition
Preface to the Pelican Edition
Part One
1. The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
2. The existential-phenomenological foundations for the understanding of psychosis
3. Ontological insecurity
Part Two
4. The embodied and unembodied self
5. The inner self in the schizoid condition
6. The false-self system
7. Self-consciousness
8. The case of Peter
Part Three
9. Psychotic developments
10. The self and the false self in a schizophrenic
11. The ghost of the weed garden: a study of a chronic schizophrenic
References
Index
"Dr. Laing is saying something very important indeed. . . . This is a truly humanist approach."
—Philip toynbee in the Observer
"It is a study that makes all other works I have read on schizophrenia seem fragmentary. . . . The author brings, through his vision and perception, that particular touch of genius which causes one to say Yes, I have always known that, why have I never thought of it before?'"
—Journal of Analytical Psychology
