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“The present book is a study of schizoid and schizophrenic persons.” So starts the preface. It is a study that makes all other works I have read on schizophrenia seem fragmentary. The aim is to present the schizophrenic person in “his” or “the” world as opposed to the viewpoint of orthodox psychiatry where the patient becomes a list of signs and symptoms existing in vacuo, or to that of Freudian theory which tends, “like a Medusa head”, to petrify the person and his underworld into mechanisms and to ignore the reality of others in the patient's life. Such approaches and theories, if used as a viewpoint of the “other”, lead to his depersonalization into an “organism”, a “thing”, an “it”, or an “object”; this is also one of the basic means of defence used by the schizophrenic—such theories are “schizogenic”. “Depersonalization in a theory which is intended to be a theory of persons is as false as schizoid depersonalization of others.…” “It is just as pathetic a fallacy as the false depersonalization of things.” “The unity of the personal” is placed at the centre of his view; it is nuclear and germinal with the person at the centre of his world. All this could remain merely another theory; this is not so; there is a strong impression of it being welded into the author's direct experience.
Laing's theoretical framework arises in the above area. The title of the first chapter astonishes by its boldness—“Foundation for a Science of Persons”. His nuclear schemata are here sketched in and they are intended as the basis of a more extensive work.
The germinal concepts used in this work are simple; they are patterned out of the basic and usually unquestioned experience of being a self or person. “Ontological insecurity” is a primary insecurity suffered by the schizophrenic; because of it he cannot be assured of the experience of the continuity of his being in time and space, and must rely on being recognized by another in order that he may feel himself to have continuous existen