The Webs of Maya

Psychiatrists have always known that a troubled man is his own worst enemy.Now, in language that is literary rather than professional, British Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing has documented what he calls "our violation of ourselves." In Knots (Pantheon; $3.95), a slim volume of verselike forms, he depicts man in bondage to himself, caught in the "webs of maya," or illusion, that he has unwittingly spun.

What are the webs made of? Of guilt, Laing seems to say--unnecessary, irrational guilt, perhaps resulting from fantasied childhood "wrongs" and from tortuous, circular reasoning about causes and effects. When a parent is angry, a child is sure that he is unloved because of his "badness." Thus:

My mother does not love me. . . I am bad because she does not love me She does not love me because I am bad.

That conviction of badness may persist into adulthood as a pervasive sense of worthlessness, destroying relationships with others:

I don't respect myself. . . I despise Tom because he does not despise me Only a despicable person can respect someone as despicable as me. .

Knots suggests that feeling "despicable" produces both fear and an inability to love. There is the fear of the fearful self:

One is afraid of the self that is afraid of. . . the self that is afraid. ,

And then there is the fear of accepting reassurance, which can become a masochistic determination to stay unhappy no matter what anyone says:

JILL I'm ridiculous JACK No, you are not JILL I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not You must be laughing at me for feeling you are laughing at me if you are not laughing at me. Even more self-damaging, perhaps, is man's fear of enjoying what he has, either because he may lose it or because he feels that he does not deserve it. To show how illogical a man's logic can be, Laing has drawn diagrams:

I am not entitled to what I have therefore everything I have is stolen because at me. I'm not entitled to it because I've stolen it therefore

A man who has little may feel that this proves that he is bad. So he becomes acquisitive to prove that he is good. Laing's arrows (beginning at any line and followed up or down) show how a corporation executive may think about his pursuit of success. He may reason, for example, that the more money he has (line 2), the more he amounts to as a human being (line 4).

the more I make the more I have the better I am the more I am

Does Laing see any way out, any possibility of untying the knots? He leaves the answer unclear, but he seems to believe that if there is a solution, it lies in a man himself--"no being has been led to nirvana."

As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it. . .

Laing once wrote that "few books today are forgivable." In the pages of Knots, psychotherapists will recognize their patients, and patients, as well as some non-patients, will recognize themselves. Many of them may enjoy learning from Laing's poetic insights. For these people, Knots will seem an eminently forgivable book.

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