"The Politics of Experience", RD Laing: Looking for the Second Title

I think I picked this up at either a sale-by-the-inch book extravaganza, or maybe the Phoenix Books, a large downtown San Luis Obispo used book-store.

In my days of collecting the authors I followed for philosophy I came across this copy of Laing's essays and speeches concerning his psychological approach to explaining alienation, schizophrenia, and other less exciting forms of interpersonal experience. It is an attack on the establishment's assumptions about "normality" and "mental sickness".

In all honesty I haven't finished it. There is a receipt from 1976 inside, and I used it as a bookmark.

Ronald Laing became one of the guys in my philosophical collection near the end of my days reading and annotating philosophy. It was his book The Divided Self that drew me in; a book about psychedelics and schizophrenia, and covered a similar theme to this book, The Politics of Experience.

Now, I ended up going in a different direction from Laing. Different direction may not be the right phrase, but at the time I ended up branching out in two separate directions philosophically. The first represents the real last few writers I roped into my philosophical dream team, Marcuse with Eros and Civilization (the last philosophy book I may have purchased)(from a little indie bookstore in Brooklyn) and the monumental The Concept of Mind, by Gilbert Ryle.

To put this in context: I was primarily a philosophy writer for about 18 months...maybe a little more. But, I was constantly searching out writers I perceived to be the building blocks of my philosophical world. With each new discovery, I added a bit to my view. Ryle was the most important final entry in the stable, but I added Marcuse years later because I liked his contention that sexuality played a non-trivial role in the development of civilization.

The other branch from the Laing tree was the one that dealt with psychedelics and their use and effect on philosophy, and that was in the direction of Carlos Castaneda and his Don Juan series.

Now Castaneda and Ryle and Marcuse will get their day in this forum. Today's post is about Laing, and the title refers to the fact that I can't find the other copy, The Divided Self. I may have loaned it to somebody.

This book, ...Politics... was left behind when we moved to Brooklyn, which explains why it was discovered anew and in good condition. Many of my more important-to-me philosophy books were trucked to New York and then to Austin, and if they weren't important enough to stay, they invariably went--as a loan out or a trade or a sale--in actions that were meant to make the collection stronger.

Left behind were this, and Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Though and Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions and others that will eventually appear here.

Wow. I haven't thought so much about my philosophy stable as I have this morning in a serious while.

Castaneda entered my world as it was changing, and my writing focus changed with it.