The AntiPsychiatry Movement JeanPaul Sartre 1905 1980 Being

The Anti-Psychiatry Movement Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 -1980) Being and Nothingness Michel Foucault (1926 -84) The Birth of the Clinic Gilles Deleuze (1925 -95) Anti-Oedipus R. D. Laing (1927 -89) The Divided Self, Knots, The Politics of Experience

Jean Paul Sartre “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning. ”

Michel Foucault • Doctor and patient are caught up in an evergreater proximity, bound together, the doctor by an ever-more attentive, more insistent, more penetrating gaze, the patient by all the silent, irreplaceable qualities that, in him, betray— that is, reveal and conceal—the clearly ordered forms of the disease. - The Birth of the Clinic.

Gilles Deleuze “The schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. ”

Ronald D. Laing (1927 -89)

R. D. Laing on Freud “The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud was a hero. He descended to the 'Underworld' and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence. ”

But … “Freud insisted that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human beings had already been abolished. Our civilization represses not only ‘the instincts’, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. ”

Society Oppresses Free Spirits

The So-Called Schizoid “The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with others’ or ‘at home in the world’…. moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on. ”

“Technical Vocabularies” “The words of the current technical vocabulary either refer to man in isolation from the other and the world, that is, as an entity not essentially 'in relation to' the other and in a world, or they refer to falsely substantialized aspects of this isolated entity. Such words are: mind and body, psyche and soma, psychological and physical, personality, the self, the organism. All these terms are abstracta. Instead of the original bond of I and You, we take a single man in isolation and conceptualize his various aspects into 'the ego', 'the superego', and 'the id'. ”

Person vs Thing

The Medical Approach “Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes. There is a common illusion that one somehow increases one's understanding of a person if one can translate a personal understanding of him into the impersonal terms of a sequence or system of it-processes. ”

The Existential Approach “The psychotic is, more than anything else, simply human …. therapist must have the plasticity to transpose himself into another strange and even alien view of the world. In this act, he draws on his own psychotic possibilities, without forgoing his sanity. Only thus can he arrive at an understanding of the patient's existential position. ”

Ontological Security “A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. ”

Insecurity “The individual … may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that [her] identity and autonomy are always in question. [Sh]e may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. [Sh]e may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. ”

Engulfment “A firm sense of one's own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity …. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hated as such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed by love. ”

Common Schizoid Response • Isolation

Implosion “The individual feels that, like a vacuum, he is empty …. Any 'contact' with reality is then in itself experienced as a dreadful threat because reality, as experienced from this position, is necessarily implosive and thus, as was relatedness in engulfment, in itself a threat to what identity the individual is able to suppose himself to have. Reality, as such, is the persecutor. ”

Petrification “A partial depersonalization of others is extensively practiced in everyday life and is regarded as normal if not highly desirable. Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role or part in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part …. [One might experience others as] deadening and impoverishing. ”