Chaosophy - autonomous learning

there will always be a collapse, in any individual, of the capacity
to distinguish between logical types" (The Self and Others) .
It is not obvious, in fact, that a series of interpersonal collapses
cannot alone produce a psychosis, or a neurosis, nor conversely
could their resolution bring about a change! One is sometimes too
quick in associating Laing's phenomenological exercises with
Sartre's work. To tell the truth, Sartre never did get tied up in the
mirror games which seem to fascinate Laing:
She desires that he desire her
He desires that she desire him
To make her desire
He pretends that he desires her . . .
(Knots)
Sartre is a man situated in history and true commitment. He would
certainly refuse the contemplative ideal which leads Laing to
declare that we can do nothing more than "reflect the decomposition
which surrounds us and which is in US."5
Is it possible today when dealing with madness to ignore the
contributions of Freud and Lacan Can one find refuge in a personalistic
and mystic wisdom without becoming the unconscious prisoner
of ideologies whose mission is to repress desire in all its forms
Let us hope that Laing, who has distinguished himself in a
remarkable way from the traditional role of the psychiatrist, will return
to a concrete struggle against the oppression suffered by the mental
patients, and that he will bring a more rigorous definition to the
conditions of a revolutionary psychiatric practice, that is to say a
nonutopian psychiatry which can be taken up in a massive way by the
avant-garde of mental health workers and by the patients themselves.
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