Dr. Laing's first purpose is to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. In this, with case studies of schizophrenic patients, he succeeds brilliantly, but he does more: through a vision of sanity and madness as 'degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent' he offers a rich existential analysis of personal alienation.

The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as 'real'. He invents a false self and with it he confronts both the outside world and his own despair. The disintegration of his real self keeps pace with the growing unreality of his false self until, in the extremes of schizophrenic breakdown, the whole personality disintegrates.

Preface to the Original Edition
Preface to the Pelican Edition

Part One

1. The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
2. The existential-phenomenological foundations for the understanding of psychosis
3. Ontological insecurity

Part Two

4. The embodied and unembodied self
5. The inner self in the schizoid condition
6. The false-self system
7. Self-consciousness
8. The case of Peter

Part Three

9. Psychotic developments
10. The self and the false self in a schizophrenic
11. The ghost of the weed garden: a study of a chronic schizophrenic