Psychopathy is the standard for identifying criminality but a few caveats should be considered: any person with a mental disorder tends to have periods of time which are normal and then there is the pathological or disordered period; the disorder is probably triggered by the social environment and not simply a continuous brain state or malfunction. The problem of antagonism in social relationships, especially concerning the “power of family” and the ‘cutting-off’ effect from “authorities" (which may or may not be via official channels) deserves to be addressed - are people being responsible when they deny their role in triggering the psychopathological break in another?
In "The Divided Self" Laing construed this attribution as a function of an extremely disjunctive relationship between the person who is in the role of a depersonalized—and depersonalizing—diagnosing psychiatrist and the person who has become a depersonalized, and sometimes depersonalizing, diagnosed patient. This construction is a contribution towards a personal understanding (*Verstehen) of what is going on between psychiatrist and patient, in contrast to a scientific explanation of what is going on in the patient alone. In fact, he offered a personal understanding of the psychiatrist's scientific explanation and construed it as, unwittingly, a way of cutting off
the cutoff person from the possibility of reunion and renewal.
The psychiatric, diagnostic look is itself a depersonalized and depersonalizing cutoff look.
Psychiatry is an application of a highly sophisticated scientific look that is culturally deeply conditioned. It is a way of seeing things, and the relation between things, by subtracting all personal experience. However, a person is not a thing, nor is a thing a person. It is a look which is cultivated with the express intention of not seeing intentions in others or even collectively as in the intention of a group. Things have no intentions. It is the exact opposite of a sensibility cultivated with the express intention of recognizing and sympathetically understanding the intentions of others, and their interconnections.
Laing is opposed to physical treatments, e.g. drugs and surgery.
