The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by R. D. Laing
Published 1960 · 82,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness to read?
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Existentialist philosophical vocabulary from Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard requires some background; used precisely but not pedantically.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Builds an existentialist ontology of selfhood before applying it to clinical cases.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Philosophical argument and extended clinical case analysis are woven together throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- The theoretical framework is established at length before being applied to patients; the cases are read against the theory rather than driving it.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The divided self, the false self system, and ontological insecurity function as structuring conceptual metaphors.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Laing's irony is directed at psychiatric orthodoxy's failure to hear what patients are actually saying.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The book diagnoses the problem more than it proposes treatment; the existentialist framework leaves recovery open.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Three-part structure — theory, the divided self, the three-part self — requires integrating philosophical argument with case material.
How The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness is regarded
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.