What is reality, versus delusion? I think of my attendance at RDLaing’s appearance at USC, where the notion was introduced, asking him of the ‘levels of experience’. Surprisingly, that question pre emoted M.Guy Thompson’s essay, ‘The Primacy of Experience’ in R.D. Laing’s Approach to psychoanalysis’.
He mentions the ‘levels of experience’ , as well. Replacing Freud’s concepts of intention with Heidegger’s intentionality,the cognitive precedent becomes obvious, on the face of it, by a metaphoric use of the word. In other words, it corresponds to the notion that the sub conscious does not begin a bad faith use of the elements of the sub conscious by an objective-literal sense, but in a sense of experiencing on different albeit non linear sense the painful experience, and merely and conveniently forgetting it.
It becomes not a deliberate ruse of self deception, but a total lack of being able to re-connect that level of reality, which consists of an untreadebke proposition of truth, the standard to which, as by way of comparison, does not exist.
Now, my experience of testing reality in terms of an exposure to the real intentions of someone in context whom I felt happened to be beguilingly there, perhaps fatalistically being there, almost as if obeying higher cosmic rules and mechanisms, or perhaps set up, as a test of fidelity, by others interested in me; mirrors, in Lacan’s sense, my own internal sense of the content of reality, pitting the inner and outer realms as either exhibiting a dual, or continuous aspects.
The discontinuity, as an expression of bad faith, is where Laing breaks with the existentialists, and in stead uses Husserl’s phenomenological exploration into the realms of the self and others. The deception occurring there is not a deliberate estrangement meant to over ride the intended excluded content, neither is it a case of wanting to believe it, which will eventually become a case of believing in it as a function of ‘Truth’. It is simply, rather, the inability to experience the IT, as a result of not experiencing the ‘voice’ of that experience, not on some re pressed level, but on a level which the experience had become expressible. It is through primary experience only that awareness becomes open, and repression cannot become opened through any other channel, either in Freudian analytic terms or, in terms of a primary experience in existential terms, because neither can re-trace to the original bracketed experience in its particular ediectic, nor phenomenal level.
The truth to the libidinal problem suggested above sets a tone to which the following solution may apply: if, the situation was set, or pre-set, as a test, then truth value analysis is unnecessary, since the set up would become void, do to its inauthentic structural level.
The second notion again is invalid, because of the difficulty in establishing correlation, between intention and intentionality, between singular players as individual part takers or, variable players seeking a single theme; as best expressed in the play, 'Six Characters ‘In Search of an Author’. Here, the players focus shifts toward a common theme, veering away on self analysis, away from questions of whether they are acting out of good or bad faith. It is the interaction whic determines a possible outcome, whose intentionality becomes a secondary derivative.
The delusion develops out of development of succeeding interactions, hopefully, and not through a dramatic action by adoption of either one of the ways in which ‘truth’, or ‘reality’ could be discovered. If, the notion is adopted, that a discovery of what’s going on is adopted, then engaging by at least two players of a particular theme, is a sine quo non.
I think Trump’s reality, can not be gathered as either as a test of how far he can push the envelope of civil obedience and constitutional adherence qua in terms of bad or good faith, since his intentional use of executive power can not be limited by, or to a singular intention. This is his problem, or will soon become appearant, when he expresses such ideas as ‘I know this better than the judges, or the generals’
The politics of his experience, will necessarily drive these notions toward ‘Real Tests’ , of executive privilege, having perhaps not having experienced them as necessary ‘Parts’, in his experience.
To analyze this, an outer, post futuristic approach may very well be appropriated.
Laing has been instrumental , much more than any other thinker in the pursuit of higher understanding of how persons tinker in pursuit of supposed common good.