Tag Archives: R. D. Laing

“Post Hypnotic Trance of Early Infancy”

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R. D. Laing once said that most of us life our lives in a “post hypnotic trance of early infancy.” Laing recognized that most of us live life unconsciously, driven by fears and anxieties that we acquired in our very early life before we had acquired reason. Most people do not realize that this earliest period of time was one of intense “conscious” awareness as we were soaking up the world in a way that would not be possible once the dawn of reason came at about age one and a half. (Aldous Huxley once posited the notion that our brain is basically a filter that selects what part of experience we will be open to.)

This core experience stays with us and will shape everything we do the rest of our lives. This core is inherently emotional, a “feeling state” that provides the basic orientation we have to the world and even to our own view of our self and that world. It will reflect our perception of our very place in the world and the perception of how much power we have to shape that world.

Asking someone to recognize this part of his/her existence is challenging and often impossible. I often use the following notion—it is like asking a fish to see water. A blog-o-sphere friend recently shared another image which I love—it is like asking someone who has fallen into a jar of marmalade and lived there all his/her life to see anything but marmalade. And this perceptual field is mutli-faceted, if not infinitely-faceted. But one facet will be the answer to this question, “Is this world an hospitable place?” Those raised in abject poverty are more inclined to answer “no” and adopt a stance of disappointment and hopelessness, a life confined to one poor choice after another. One that is born into a world that is stable is more likely to adopt a world view that sees potential, that sees the beauty…and the ugliness…in the world and says to himself/herself, “Hey, I can do this!”

A key task in life is the gain a perspective on our perspective and as one philosopher has said that to do so is to “somehow escape it.” I would qualify his observation with the notion that this meta-cognition is at least a step in the direction of escaping it. The next step will require courage, the courage to take the step beyond from time to time, to step into the beyond. And someone has noted, “When taking a far journey, you can’t see the destination until you have lost sight of the shore from which you departed.”  It makes me think of the Call of Abraham who was asked to forsake everything and “go unto a land that I will show thee.”

Family dysfunction

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“There’s something wrong with me.” During my clinical practice, this observation from a client was often a turning point. This often represented a shift in perspective, a realization that the problem was not merely “the world out there” but “the world in here”. This often meant that the client was willing to recognize that he/she had a history of very poor choices and that these choices had created the morass that had led him/her into counseling in the first place. This usually involved contemplating various labels, i.e. diagnoses, clinical contrivances designed to “give shape to our anguish.”

This always involved addressing how harsh the world had been to the individual…dysfunctional family and all…but it entailed quickly realizing that choices one had made on a daily basis had perpetuated the problem. It always involved looking at the “chooser” that one had formulated early in life, a mechanism that continued relentlessly to perpetuate the maladaptive behavior pattern, aka the “shame cycle.”

This usually involved the experience of hell in some fashion. It involved realizing that one was trapped, that there was no escape (“No Exit” as Sartre put it), and the bitter anguish of hopelessness. This was the “bottoming out” phenomena, the reaching of the limit of the ego’s machinations, and subsequently the dawning of the possibility of a turn-about in life.

The client was often brought face to face with a real paradoxical dilemma. The more he/she voiced his/her anguish…particularly to the family of origin…the more he/she remained imprisoned in his/her private hell. R. D. Laing wrote decades ago about the dilemma of the individual who was caught in an “untenable position” in a dysfunctional family. The more this individual protests, the louder and more passionate be his/her protestations, the more “proof” does the family have that the individual is…for lack of a better term…nuts. So the anguish intensifies and so do the screams. And the family will often look on with bewilderment, perhaps asking, “What is wrong with Johnny or Susie…”

Often the client would have to realize that the validation he/she sought would never come from the family of origin. It just was not possible. Some families are trapped in their own pathology and any individual in that family that protests, that deigns to confront the systemic poison that consumes them all, will not find a ready ear within that family. That “ready ear”, that validation, is going to have to be found elsewhere. Note here what Leonardo da Vinci noted on this issue:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)

Validation is powerful medicine. As Conrad Aiken said, “And this is peace to know our thoughts known.”