Laing criticizes Freud for not having "constructs for any social system generated by more than one person at a time." The criticism is somewhat hasty. While Freud lacks a construct for interpersonal relations comparable to Laing's Us and Them, Freud's pleasure and reality principles provide an approach to the problem of the individual and society which has no counterpart in Laing. Laing show no recognition of the economic basis of civilization, and does not attempt to reconcile his suggestions on sanity and inner voyages with an economic theory. Laing distrusts the validity of any system too large to be experienced by one person.
Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization, has used Freud's pleasure and reality principles to achieve a formulation of the resolution of the disjunctive processes of society. He foresees the complete alienation of labor, the stage at which ultimate automation has eliminated all want and necessity and minimized, to the point of elimination, the need for work. Ultimate automation will obviate the values of productivity, utility, competition and mastery and domination of the human and non-human environments which are components of the Freudian reality principle, called by Marcuse "the performance principle." The reality principle, no longer a performance principle, will be fundamentally altered and will lose its repressive aspects. In the non-repressive civilization envisioned by Marcuse, "the subjective and objective world, man and nature are harmonized."
Marcuse is a contemporary extension of the rational, analytic tradition which included Freud. Laing is a contemporary representative of the mystical humanist tradition which, in the last two centuries, has produced such formidable anti-rationalists as Blake, Nietzsche, and Hesse. The position of Laing in this tradition is beyond the scope of this article; his parallels with Blake, Nietzsche and Hesse too numerous to summarize here.
I have known two students who have dropped out of school in the last few months while undergoing what might be called a crisis of self-discovery. Both of them felt two books were extremely relevant to their crises: Hesse's Demian and Laing's Politics of Experience. Like the hero of Hesse's Demian both boys felt a need to withdraw from the definitions and demands of the academic and business worlds, to explore and cultivate a world inside them, "to try to live," in Hesse's words, "in accord with the promptings which came from the true self." They sensed an inner reality which was as consistent and self-validating as the external reality with which it was at odds.
The experiences of these young men attest to the relevance of The Politics of Experience. Laing's emphasis on the need in modern life to restore the meaning of the inner to the substance of the outer has pinpointed a particularly virulent and prevalent form of the contemporary malaise of alienation.
The Politics of Experience has many problems, among them erratic style and a multiplicity of directions and intentions, evidenced by the non-fulfillment of the title, and arising from the book's origin as a conglomeration of separate articles. As a program for radical change it leaves much to be desired. Its constructive suggestions are two: treat the mentally ill with more respect; and discover yourself by temporarily dissolving your ego. But Laing's mystical humanism offers a necessary and valuable antithesis to the analytic tradition in radical social thought. It is a loud, passionate reminder that mankind's fulfillment is by definition the fulfillment of each individual's experience.