Abstract

R. D. Laing characterized psychosis as a potentially healing experience rather than a biochemical disease entity. He argued that persons diagnosed as schizophrenic have been victims of "mystification," which involves a misdefining of their own experience by family and society. Laing understood psychotic symptoms as intelligible expressions of the mentally ill person's mystification. Such persons embody the prevailing alienation inherent in their own family and culture. ;Laing's theory of schizophrenia was influenced in part by his own experience of mystification within his family of origin. In addition, Laing was greatly influenced by the work of D. W. Winnicott, particularly with respect to his view of "psychopathology" as a symbolic protest against failures in the original "holding environment." ;A major criticism of Laing's approach has been his failure to use standard scientific methodology. Laing, however, operated from the philosophical and methodological position of "existential phenomenology" which attempts to gain knowledge of subjective human experience from the perspective of the individual being studied. As such, it does not concern itself with statistical definitions of normality. ;A Laingian understanding of serious mental illness regards psychosis not as an illness to be eliminated by psychiatric treatment but rather as an indictment of alienated societies. The so-called mentally ill call attention to this alienation and in doing so, they invite the mentally "well" into a greater mutuality with them. ;Laing rejected conventional forms of psychiatric treatment for persons regarded as seriously mentally ill. Instead, he advocated alternative approaches which would better enable the seriously mentally ill to experience "mutuality" with other persons, including their caregivers and therapists. Empathy--the ability to understand a person's subjective experience from that person's own perspective--is at the heart of a Laingian approach to therapy with the seriously mentally ill. Such an approach will strive to provide a corrective "holding environment" in which "regression" can be experienced. "Interpretation" serves not to improve cognitive understanding but rather to communicate a deep understanding of the mentally ill person's experience