The divided self

the psychoanalytic approach

Ronald D. Laing

pp. 63-76

in: Elizabeth A. Stewart, Exploring twins, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are discourses of meaning and practice both of which place the concept of the unconscious at their centre. Whatever their different arguments, the various schools share in common a paradigm in which a dynamic and conflictual reality inaccessible to conscious thought plays a major role in the determination of human development.