We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
R. D. LaingRead
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
Interpretation
Madness can lead to both destruction and a new understanding or liberation.
R. D. Laing's quote suggests that madness should not be viewed solely as a negative experience or breakdown; instead, it can also represent a breakthrough, a potential for personal liberation and renewal. This suggests a duality in the concept of madness, highlighting that while it can lead to suffering and existential crises, it can also pave the way for profound personal transformation and insight.
In practice
In a mental health seminar discussing the positive aspects of mental illness.
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.
Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.
Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
We as black people are not a monolithic bunch. We are not all the same, and neither are women. Instead, we are all individuals who have these extraordinary stories to tell and share with each other that will enrich all of our lives and help us all become more ourselves and better people.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
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