The Politics Of Experience And The Bird Of Paradise
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In an era when psychiatry sought to categorize and contain the human mind, R. D. Laing mounted a radical and electrifying challenge to the very foundations of mental illness, sanity, and social conformity. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise argues that what society labels as madness may in fact be a sane response to an insane world — a provocative thesis that dismantled mid-twentieth-century assumptions about the self, alienation, and the coercive power of social institutions. Laing chronicles the inner landscape of human experience with unflinching clarity, presenting schizophrenia not as a disease to be suppressed, but as a potentially transformative journey through the fractured terrain of modern existence. A landmark text of the anti-psychiatry movement and a cornerstone of 1960s counterculture thought, this work pairs penetrating sociological critique with passages of near-poetic intensity — most notably in the hallucinatory prose-poem The Bird of Paradise, which pushes language itself to its limits in an attempt to articulate the ineffable. Laing's style is at once clinical and visionary, bridging the gap between empirical observation and existentialist philosophy, drawing on the work of Sartre, Heidegger, and Freud. Decades after its first publication, the question it leaves burning in the reader's mind remains urgently unresolved: who, truly, has the authority to define the boundaries of a sane mind?
Author: R. D. Laing
Format: Paperback
Genre: Psychology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In an era when psychiatry sought to categorize and contain the human mind, R. D. Laing mounted a radical and electrifying challenge to the very foundations of mental illness, sanity, and social conformity. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise argues that what society labels as madness may in fact be a sane response to an insane world — a provocative thesis that dismantled mid-twentieth-century assumptions about the self, alienation, and the coercive power of social institutions. Laing chronicles the inner landscape of human experience with unflinching clarity, presenting schizophrenia not as a disease to be suppressed, but as a potentially transformative journey through the fractured terrain of modern existence. A landmark text of the anti-psychiatry movement and a cornerstone of 1960s counterculture thought, this work pairs penetrating sociological critique with passages of near-poetic intensity — most notably in the hallucinatory prose-poem The Bird of Paradise, which pushes language itself to its limits in an attempt to articulate the ineffable. Laing's style is at once clinical and visionary, bridging the gap between empirical observation and existentialist philosophy, drawing on the work of Sartre, Heidegger, and Freud. Decades after its first publication, the question it leaves burning in the reader's mind remains urgently unresolved: who, truly, has the authority to define the boundaries of a sane mind?