Reflections on Narcissism, Psychiatry, and R.D. Laing

Note: Yesterday, I posted what I see as a thoughtful, even, hopefully, a somewhat penetrating perspective on what is going on WITHIN us, re: our perception of the ongoing horrors of Israel/Palestine. And yet the post attracted far fewer readers than usual. What does this mean?

Yesterday afternoon, on a walk with a 31 year old male friend, I was told that all but one of his friends (and he has many friends) have recently gone to a psychiatrist “and got diagnosed!” What?

Usually with autism, he said, and often with other labels as well. He can’t help but see their preoccupation with analyzing the self as an extension of the narcissistic self-obsession of his generation, their preoccupation with “taking selfies” for social media accounts.

But there’s a difference: preoccupation with selfies doesn’t automatically lead to ingesting pharmaceutical drugs, whereas going to a psychiatrist to get diagnosed likely does.

So here we go. If his generation was out of touch with reality before, with the trans phenomenon also infecting their social disorder, are they now — seemingly gleefully! and all at once? — joining the vast majority of humanity that is on pharmaceutical drugs, thus altering, and possibly even destroying what they might have become, had they not been so hive minded

Oh, but wait! Statistically, it looks like they’ve been part of the vast crowd all along.

Number of People Taking Psychiatric Drugs in the United States

Back in the 1960s, at the suggestion of my quite unusual mentor at Boston University, I picked up R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience and read it, but saw the the book as simple-minded.

One year later, I read the book again, and this time declared it the simple truth.

Question: What had happened to me in between?

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s way of perceiving the world paralleled what was happening to me. An involuntary opening, which would have been scary as hell, had I not kept that book, plus Jung’s memoir, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, under my pillow at night. I was opening into a vastly expanded world that was actually shared by others! Not others that I knew personally, but that didn’t matter. As long as I was not the only one, I knew I was not crazy.

At this point in my long life, Laing’s anti-psychiatric attitude towards what his fellow psychiatrists deem madness is so deeply entertwined with my own that I tend to forget how it got started in me.

Here’s another Laing quote, and this one reminds me of the post I put up yesterday.