The language in which Laing chooses to discuss the world of the schizophrenic is that of existential phenomenology, and it is to the existential tradition that he acknowledges his main indebtedness. The self is in the world and relates to the world by means of its body. Some persons, however, become ontologically insecure, i.e., they feel persecuted by reality itself. The self becomes dissociated both from its own body and from the whole external world of people and events. The psychotic's freedom consists in being inaccessible.
Action is the dead end of possibility.
It scleroses freedom. Clearly, the language of existential phenomenology is hard to reconcile with the mode of expression which is familiar in fiction. However, if there is a division in our ways of understanding human life, this language must be placed on the same side as that of literature. On the whole, one may say that if it has healed the former rift, it has done so at the expense of widening the latter. For example, Laing describes the origin of one form of schizophrenia as the result of an attempt to strip the self of all behaviour, and he then argues that the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood.