The Facts of Life: An Essay in Feelings, Facts and Fantasy

The book is made of bits of journals, bits of lectures, memories, meditations--some impenetrably abstract & logically involuted, some embarrassingly speculative & poetic--among which one may wander at will. But in content it's new, evidence that Laing's moved on, deeper into himself, deeper into the mystery of life. It's a meditation without answers, philosophical, personal & biological, on the question, "Who am I?" Perhaps the most striking part of it is the personal. Laing's no longer talking only about patients or people in trouble, but about himself. His own quite bleak & repressed early history is told with a bald plainness that suggests both sadness & harsh humor. He moves from the conundrum conventionally called "the facts of life"--our origin in sexual reproduction--into more bizarre territory: the possibility (documented by incidents in therapy) that we remember, are haunted by, & reenact our conception, implantation, fetal life & birth, the loss of the cord & placenta that were part of us. He relates odd things that have happened to his mind, & odd encounters with others, that hint at the vast mysteries lying iceberg-like beyond consciousness. The whole is informed by an implicit compassion that turns explicit in an attack on "heartless" science unaware of its own unconscious sadistic motives. Despite its flights & obscurities, this is a real contribution to the literature of wonder--rich, disorderly, suggestive, inconclusive & humane.