The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise

Hah, while looking for a picture to post this with on google images, I came across a few pictures of Russell Brand with the book in his hand, and the book even seemed to have page markers inside made from large pieces of paper in it. That could be loose pages though. I have the same old copy of the book, which is quite fragile.

Distractions aside, I find The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by R.D. Laing a very important book. It is a book about many things, ultimately, as it comments on society and existence. There are lots of things I thought about that backed up the points being made in the book in general life, whereas Laing made them to do with psychiatry and schizophrenia, which is the authors field of expertise. And so the audience of this book would most likely be interested in psychiatry. Sometimes it is written loosely from an anthropological point of view too, so anyone studying anthropology should be interested in it.

If you're going to read it, I'm going to tell you that you should probably read it carefully.

Since I've got a 1970's copy of the book, which has a different blurb to the modern one going about now, I will transcribe the blurb of that edition for the readers of this blog:
" Is there anywhere such a thing as a normal man?

Modern society clamps a straitjacket of conformity on every child that's born. In the process man's potentialities are devastated and the terms 'sanity' and 'madness' become ambiguous. The schizophrenic may simply be someone who has been unable to suppress his normal instincts and conform to an abnormal society.

The whole question of 'normality' is raised in this new book by Dr. Laing, the author of The Divided Self. In the fog of psychological ambiguities, as he sees it, we cannot rely on the navigators, just because the theories of experts about alienation too often manifests the very faults they describe. The authors argument leads him to explore the psychological weapons of constriction, deprivation, splitting, and projection; and he does not hesitate to call on science, rhetoric, poetry, and polemic to support his points. If he leaves us with little more than the bitter taste of truth in this modern dilemma, at least he believes that 'as long as there are survivors, there is still hope.'

That's all I'm going to write about this. If anyone happens to read or have read the book and would like to talk about a certain point made in it or just discuss it in general I'd probably like that. It is my favourite book and it is a necessary one in my point of view.