psychiatrist
who wrote extensively on mental illness
in particular, the experience of psychosis
. 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.
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
Social phenomenology is the science of my own and of others' experience. It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is, with inter-experience. It is concerned with your behaviour and my behaviour as I experience it, and your and my behaviour as you experience it.
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.