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We must continue to struggle through our confusion
to insist on being human.
RD Laing.
I am an experienced psychotherapist in private practice in King’s Lynn Norfolk.
I trained at The Philadelphia Association , which was founded by RD Laing, and colleagues, in the 1960′s.
RD Laing and others, were at this time engaged in challenging many of the assumptions and ways of thinking in society, especially in relation to the diagnosis and treatment of mental health, particularly in the psychiatric context.
Laing challenged the objectifying and mechanistic response to mental health, that denied human subjectivity in alls its complexity,confusions and possibilities.
Today, we are faced with the same challenges.
All human suffering is inextricably bound up with the world in which we live. And yet the main response to peoples misery suffering and pain, is predominantly likely to be medication, or some form of cognitive re-training. A response that is dictated entirely by economics and politics, a medicalised computerised response, that encourages people to think that the ‘problem’ is in their head in some way, that their difficulties are somehow their own fault and their responsibility, alone.
I believe that we constantly need to be aware of the enormously powerful influences in society that encourage us not to think,to accept what we are told without question, to believe that we are as human beings little more than well run computers, who ocassionally go wrong and need fixing.
In a society where we are daily losing contact with the natural world, where relationships with each other are being eroded by computers and the new technologies, where a shared space in the community is under threat, and where consumption is offered as the answer to all of life’s problems, we are also encouraged to believe that there are quick and easy answers, as to why any one of us finds, that life is quite often difficult, complex, messy and painful.
