What Is Sane What Is Madness

Did you ever wonder what was the difference between being sane
and being mad? Rent the movie "The King of Hearts" or, read R.D. Laing.

Here's and excerpt from:

Transcendental Experience In Relation to Religion and Psychosis

by
R.D. Laing

"From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet any more "true" madness than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in "patients" is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the Divine, no longer its betrayer."

Laing was the founder of the Philadelphia Association.

The following quotation appears in the ABOUT US - R D LAING page of their website. ... worth reading!

"At a time when psychiatry and psychology are convinced of the biological basis of mental illness and of the (largely) chemical answer to the problem, Laing's best work stands as a challenge, a voice claiming that there is another way of making sense of these matters and that there are other ways of helping people deal with them. Still valid too is Laing's insistence that there is indeed meaning in madness and that the discourse of the disturbed may well make sense if listened to in the right spirit. While it is common to hear that his ideas have been discredited or even disproved (whatever that might mean), there seems little doubt that he (among others) changed the way that mental illness is understood, and changed the ways in which those designated mentally ill are treated."