persons and experience

from the politics of experience by r.d. laing

our task is both to experience and to conceive the concrete, that is to say, reality in its fullness and wholeness.

but this is quite impossible, immediately.  experientially and conceptually, we have fragments.

we can begin from concepts of the single person, from the relations between two or more persons, from groups or from society at large; or from the material world, and conceive of individuals as secondary.  we can derive the main determinants of our individual and social behavior from external exigencies.  all these views are partial vistas and partial concepts.  theoretically one needs a spiral of expanding and contracting schemata that enable us to move freely and without discontinuity from varying degrees of abstraction to greater and lesser degrees of concreteness.  theory is the articulated version of experience.  this book begins and ends with the person.

can human beings be persons today?  can a man be his actual self with another man or womyn?  before we can ask such an optimistic question as 'what is a personal relationship?', we have to ask if a personal relationship is possible, or are persons possible in our present situation?  we are concerned with the possibility of man.  this question can be asked only through its facets.  is love possible?  is freedom possible?

whether or not all, or some, or no human beings are persons, i wish to define a person in a twofold way: in terms of experience, as a center of orientation of the objective universe; and in terms of behavior, as the origin of actions.  personal experience transforms a given field into a field of intention and action: only through action can our experience be transformed.  it is tempting and facile to regard 'persons' as only separate objects in space, who can be studied as any other natural objects can be studied.  but just as kierkegaard remarked that one will never find consciousness by looking down a microscope at brain cells or anything else, so one will never find persons by studying persons as thought they were only objects.  a person is the me or you, he or she, whereby an object is experienced.  are these centers of experience, and origins of actions, living in entirely unrelated worlds of their own composition?  everyone must refer here to their own experience.  my own experience as a center of experience and origin of action tells me that this is not so.  my experience and my action occur in a social field of reciprocal influence and interaction.

. . .

it is quite possible to study the visible, audible, smellable effulgences of human bodies, and much study of human behavior has been in those terms.  one can lump together very large numbers of units of behavior and regard them as a statistical population, in no way different from the multiplicity constituting a system of non-human objects.  but one will not be studying persons.  in a science of persons, i shall state as axiomatic that: behavior is a function of experience; and both experience and behavior are always in relation to someone or something other than self.

when two (or more) persons are in relation, the behavior of each towards the other is mediated by the experience by each of the other, and the experience of each is mediated by the behavior of each.  there is no contiguity between the behavior of one person and that of the other.  much human behavior can be seen as unilateral or bilateral attempts to eliminate experience.  a person may treat another as though he was not a person.  there is no contiguity between one person's experience and another.  my experience of you is always mediated through your behavior.  behavior that is the direct consequence of impact, as of one billiard-ball hitting another, or experience directly transmitted to experience, as in the possible cases of extra-sensory perception, is not personal. 

. . .

what we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive action on experience.  it is radically estranged from the structure of being.

the more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical 'mechanisms'.

. . .

experience is invisible to the other.  but experience is not 'subjective' rather than 'objective', not 'inner' rather than 'outer', not process rather than praxis, not input rather than output, not psychic rather than somatic, not some doubtful data dredged up from introspection rather than extrospection.  least of all is experience 'intra-psychic process'.  such transactions, object-relations, interpersonal relations, transference, counter-transference, as we suppose to go on between people are not the interplay merely of two objects in space, each equipped with ongoing intra-psychic processes.

this distinction between outer and inner usually refers to the distinction between behavior and experience; but sometimes it refers to some experiences that are supposed to be 'inner' in contrast to others that are 'outer'.  more accurately this is a distinction between different modalities of experience, namely, perception (as outer) in contrast to imagination etc. (as inner). but perceptions, imagination, phantasy, reverie, dreams, memory, are simply different modalities of experience, none more 'inner' or 'outer' than any others.

yet this way of talking does reflect a split in our experience.  we seem to live in two worlds, and many people are aware only of the 'outer' rump.  as long as we remember that the 'inner' world is not some space 'inside' the body or the mind, this way of talking can serve our purpose. . . the 'inner', then, is our personal idiom of experiencing our bodies, other people, the animate and inanimate world: imagination, dreams, phantasy, and beyond that to ever further reaches of experience.

. . .

men have, however, always been weighed down not only by their sense of subordination to fate and chance, to ordained external necessities or contingencies, but by a sense that their very own thoughts and feelings, in their most intimate insterstices, are the outcome, the resultant, of processes which they undergo.

a man can estrange himself from himself by mystifying himself and others.  he can also have what he does stolen from him by the agency of others.

if we are stripped of our experience, we are stripped of our deeds; and if our deeds are, so to say, taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children, we are bereft of our humanity.  we cannot be deceived.  men can and do destroy the humanity of other men, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent.  we are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections.  we are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways.  each of us is the other to the others.  man is a patient-agent, agent-patient, interexperiencing and interacting with his fellows.

it is quite certain that unless we can regulate our behavior much more satisfactorily than at the present, then we are going to exterminate ourselves.  but as we experience the world, so we act, and this principle holds even when action conceals rather than discloses our experience.

we are not able even to think adequately about the behavior that is at the annihilating edge.  but what we think is less than what we know: what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is.