Notes on RD Laing "The Divided Self"

 

The schizophrenia spectrum encompasses both schizotypal or schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia and related psychoses. These schizophrenia psychosis are distinguished from schizotypal/ schizoid personality disorder by the presence of notable and persistent psychotic symptoms (Laing, 1965: 17). The schizotypy concept – a distinct behavioural phenotype associated with increased risk for psychotic symptoms with empirical evidence supporting it (Linscott & Van Os, 2010) – is regarded as co-existent with the schizophrenia spectrum. This part will discuss RD Laing's model for disorders of self associated with the schizophrenia spectrum in particular. It will not focus on how these states develop or theoretical models of how psychotic symptoms develop from them.

Laing described ontological insecurity of loss of individual identity as an important feature of the schizophrenia spectrum which he refers to as the schizoid state (Laing, 1965: 39-46) where people have fear of engulfment (of identity by other individuals during interpersonal interactions), implosion (where the individual feels empty and reality threatens to invade and destroy them) and petrification (whereby someone’s autonomy is negated and they become objectified by another person).

This ontological insecurity leads to schizoid individuals protecting themselves by creating a ‘false self’ that interacts with the world. In most individuals a vital embodied self has real perceptions of or meaningful actions on the ‘other’ (such as other individuals or the external world). By contrast, schizoid individuals have an inner true self interacts with the world via a false self that has a generalised deadness and results in unreal perceptions of or futile actions on the ‘other’ (Laing, 1965: 78-82).

The inner self aims to protect itself from destruction by others but only results in this self losing any firm attachment to reality and becomes like a tenuous gas occupying this self, it “becomes unreal”, “empty, dead and split” and experiences strong negative angry emotions as result (Laing, 1965: 139-140). The split in the sense of self leads to problems distinguishing what is self and not-self including one’s own body, “disembodying  the sense of ‘I’” (Laing, 1965: 175). 

References

 

Laing, R.D., 1965. The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin: Middlesex, UK.

Linscott, R.J. and van Os, J., 2010. Systematic reviews of categorical versus continuum models in psychosis: evidence for discontinuous subpopulations underlying a psychometric continuum. Implications for DSM-V, DSM-VI, and DSM-VII. Annual review of clinical psychology, 6, pp.391-419.