Awakening to love

Abstract

I discuss three phases of development in Laing's phenomenology of love: Phase I, first beginnings, up to the publication of The Divided Self, Phase II, social phenomenology and the politics of experience, and Phase III, intra-uterine patterns and the lies of love. In Phase I, I start out with an observation Ronnie makes from his neurosurgical days on how coma patients live or die depending on the presence or absence of loving attention. Then I outline an early programme drafted by Ronnie in preparation for a phenomenology of love, titled ‘Reflections on the ontology of human relations’, written in Glasgow in 1954 as a young psychiatric resident. Next I show how the notion of ‘ontological insecurity’ in The Divided Self renders the schizophrenic experience intelligible and how this notion stems from Laing's revision of phenomenology to become a phenomenology of awakening to love. Then I retell the story of Julie, ‘the ghost of the weed garden’, which illustrates the powerful healing capacity of Ronnie's early lived phenomenology. In Phase III I give a brief account of social phenomenology as developed in Sanity, Madness and the Family. This research culminated in the founding of Kingsley Hall and the Philadelphia Association, set up to provide alternatives to institutional psychiatry. I go on to discuss Laing's Politics of Experience and his Politics of the Family, provocative challenges to complacency and norms. Phase III follows Ronnie's plunge into the description of intra-uterine patterns and their resonance in mythologies and everyday repetitive patterns of disruptions to relatedness and love. Finally, I take up his phenomenological study of jealousy, a key moment in his incomplete manuscript ‘The challenge of love’. I conclude with a remark on Laing's phenomenology of love on the way towards realizing goodness in the Levinasian sense of an ethics of responsibility.