Dude, seriously, this R.D.Laing dude was the damn shit: “So unlike the majority of mental health professionals, Laing construed normality as a kind of deficiency disease, characterized by lack of authenticity, and/or access to “deeper” levels of the psyche, i.e. the primitive and the sublime.” Blah blah blah. More good stuff about him as I find it.

Ooh! Another good one: “Laing defined normality as a state of unconscious complicity in ’social phantasy systems’.”

What is repressed among normal people, said Laing, are not instincts (Freud), or even specific events or losses, or the feelings and phantasies engendered by them, but whole modalities and possibilities of experience and relatedness to others that are proscribed by society as irrational, excessive, infantile and so on. Yet the self-estrangement inherent in this process is not a source of consciously experienced suffering, nor of unconscious conflict, and therefore, of neurotic symptomatology (a la Freud). On the contrary, it dissipates conflict, conducing to a “conflict free” adaptation to one’s surrounding – one that passes for health, more or less. With so much of ourselves wrapped in obscurity, said Laing, we might at least honor the mad for gaining intermittment access to domains of experience that we deliberately shun in the interests of maintaining our pseudo-sane adaptations.

I agree that normal people suck balls… only they don’t really. And maybe that’s part of the problem.