In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
R. D. LaingDoctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.
R. D. LaingThe condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of oneโs mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R. D. LaingIf I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
R. D. Laing