Deception and Trauma in Existential Psychoanalysis: Laing and Freud on Mystification
An essay in reading Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis (Chapter 11)
Deception and trauma in existential psychoanalysis are not treated as mere clinical “content” to decode, nor as the private property of an isolated mind. In Michael Guy Thompson’s Chapter 11, they become the ethical problem that quietly governs everything else: the question of what happens to a person’s relation to reality when reality is repeatedly bent, denied, or strategically withheld, and what it demands of a therapist who claims to practice psychoanalysis in the name of truth. Thompson’s wager is that R.D. Laing’s work, so often positioned as psychoanalysis’ rebellious counterpoint, becomes most intelligible when we notice how thoroughly Freud inhabits it, even where Freud is barely named.
This is not only a theoretical matter, and it is not a dispute to be settled by choosing a camp. For therapists, Thompson’s chapter presses on the uncomfortable point that technique is never merely technique, because every technique presupposes an ethic, and the ethic can be betrayed in the very procedures meant to protect it. For patients, it gives language to an injury that often resists language: the peculiar devastation of being made to doubt one’s experience, and of discovering, often too late, that one’s world had been organized around what was concealed. Thompson’s claim is that the trauma at issue here is not simply what “happened,” but what happened to the possibility of believing what happens.
The gulf Laing refused to accept
Thompson begins where existential psychoanalysis often begins, not with a doctrine but with a stance. He portrays the most telling feature of Laing’s clinical technique as a radical effort to eliminate the gulf that customarily hardens between therapists and their patients, so that the patient can feel, in the therapist’s presence, not the impersonal authority of a procedure but “another human being like themselves,” someone who shares the ordinary weight of living and the ordinary capacity for pain. The point is deceptively simple, and it becomes demanding precisely because it deprives the therapist of a familiar refuge: the refuge of role, the refuge of expertise performed as distance, the refuge of a professional posture that can quietly turn the other into an object. In Laing’s hands, the clinical encounter becomes an exposure, because the therapist’s relation to truth cannot be kept outside the room as a private virtue while technique proceeds inside the room as a neutral instrument.
Thompson does not sentimentalize this stance as “niceness,” and he does not treat it as a rejection of analytic discipline. He treats it as a more austere demand: that the therapist’s humanity is not an ornament of the work but one of its conditions, and that the ethical imperative is not an afterthought added to interpretation but the ground on which interpretation can be trusted. The deeper problem, in other words, is not whether a therapist can interpret cleverly, but whether the relationship being formed can bear truth without collapsing into coercion, and whether the therapist can bear the temptation to manage reality, even in the name of improvement.
Freud’s “Truth and Trauma” and the expansion of reality
If Laing’s technique begins with the abolition of the gulf, Thompson’s argument begins with a different abolition, the abolition of an easy story about Laing’s relation to psychoanalysis. Thompson insists that Freud’s influence on Laing was “pervasive,” though generally omitted, and he goes further, suggesting that Laing saw himself, quietly and without fanfare, as Freud’s intellectual heir, with a style of allusion that makes the inheritance hard to see unless one knows how to listen for it. What matters is not biographical gossip about influence but the alignment of a central preoccupation: deception and its relation to trauma.
Thompson’s route through Freud is precise, because it follows the transformation of Freud’s own theory of trauma. Freud begins, under Charcot’s influence, with a relatively direct idea, that hysterical symptoms follow from traumatic seductions, from sexual experiences imposed on the child, a theory whose apparent concreteness has a certain moral clarity. Yet the theory collapses under contradictory evidence, and Freud’s collapse becomes, for Thompson, one of psychoanalysis’ decisive expansions: if some patients trace symptoms to traumas that did not occur as events, then fantasies have force, and “psychical reality” must be taken into account alongside practical reality. That phrase is not an escape from truth but a widening of truth’s domain, because it names the way the psyche can be organized around scenes that have the status of reality for the person, regardless of historical verification, and because it locates trauma not only in external violation but in the psyche’s own struggle to bear what it anticipates, what it dreads, and what it cannot admit it already knows.
Thompson reads Freud’s later conception as a subtle account of how deception and conflict co-constitute each other. The child, vulnerable to disappointment, can repress what is too painful, replacing an objectionable reality with an inviting fantasy, and thereby “not experiencing” the disappointment in the ordinary sense while still suffering its effects; later, anxiety forms around the fear of discovering what one must not know, which is to say, around the dread of re-encountering something that, in reality, has already happened. Trauma becomes inseparable from concealment, and the psyche’s defenses become, in their own way, deceptions that purchase bearability at the cost of truth. It is in this terrain, where reality is not denied merely because a person is irrational but because reality is unbearable, that Freud’s theory can be extended without being reduced to moral judgment.
What matters clinically, and existentially, is that the question of truth is no longer reducible to whether something “really happened,” as if the psyche were a courtroom. The question becomes: what has the status of reality for this person, what has been split off in order to survive, and what kind of relationship is required for what has been disavowed to become bearable without humiliation or coercion. Freud’s move toward psychical reality, in this sense, is already an ethical move, because it refuses the contempt implicit in dismissing the person’s experience as mere fabrication, and it binds the analyst to a more difficult fidelity, fidelity to the reality that is lived, even when it is not easily verified.
From psychical reality to social phenomenology
This is the point at which Thompson’s chapter takes its most consequential turn, because he argues that Laing takes Freud’s conception of psychic trauma and applies it to delusional confusion, but does so “in a more dialectical framework,” and this dialectical shift changes the moral topology of the clinical scene. Freud had emphasized fantasy as a way the psyche avoids objectionable realities, and even when Freud attends to interpersonal deceptions, the conceptual center remains intrapsychic conflict. Laing, by contrast, asks what happens when deception is not primarily what I do to myself, but what is done to me, repeatedly, by others, and done in a way that aims not merely at my compliance but at the manipulation of my experience, and therefore my reality.
Thompson names this shift with Laing’s term “social phenomenology,” defined as an “internal critique” of how others affect, and sometimes play havoc with, my experience. The emphasis is decisive: the psyche is not simply a private theater, because the stage itself is partly built by others, and the lines one is forced to speak are sometimes the lines of another person’s denial. Laing’s dialectical dimension, as Thompson describes it, is the tormenting structure of interpersonal reality: what I think you think about me, and what you in fact think but conceal, and the way this concealment invades my capacity to know what is happening, and to trust that what is happening is nameable. When this dialectic becomes chronic, the problem is no longer only repression or wish-fulfillment; the problem becomes confusion as an existential injury.
Thompson’s formulation is stark and, if taken seriously, unsettling. Laing concluded that schizophrenia can be understood as the consequence of deceptions employed on someone who assumes he is being told the truth, and who depends on what the other tells him to be true. The language is careful. It does not romanticize psychosis. It does not reduce it to an abstract “break” from reality. It suggests that what is shattered is the person’s footing in reality, and that the shattering can be precipitated by relational conditions in which truth becomes unstable, where the person is repeatedly forced into the impossible task of sustaining a reality that is denied by those on whom he depends.
This is also where Thompson’s contrast between Freud and Laing becomes clinically useful, because it clarifies two different models of trauma that do not exclude each other but interact. Freud often conceived trauma in terms of frustration that thwarts anticipated pleasure, a model that makes sense for neurosis and for the ordinary compromises of life. Laing envisioned a different form of trauma that could account for psychotic anxiety and withdrawal: states of confusion that follow when one’s reality has been savaged, not through self-deception alone, but through being duped or deceived by another, and the loss of reality becomes more poignant precisely because it compounds frustration with disorientation. In contemporary idiom, one might reach for “gaslighting,” but Laing’s point is more radical than a popular term can hold, because it concerns the conditions under which a person is forced to betray his own perception in order to remain attached, and the way attachment can become the vehicle of unreality.
To say this is not to collapse all psychosis into family dynamics, nor to transform existential psychoanalysis into a single-cause polemic. Thompson explicitly resists simplistic causality. What he insists on, instead, is that reality is not merely a given, it is something that is sustained, confirmed, or subverted between people, and that the clinical task cannot be faithful to experience if it treats relational deception as incidental.
Mystification in therapy, a vocabulary for interpersonal deception
Thompson’s reading of Laing’s oeuvre sharpens the point further by showing that deception between persons is not a marginal theme in Laing, it is a sustained preoccupation across his most prolific decade. Thompson notes, with some irony, that The Divided Self is the only major work of Laing’s in which interpersonal deception does not play a major role, since it is oriented toward the existential experience of going mad rather than toward the social context that later becomes central. The shift is visible in Self and Others, where Laing turns toward the effect human beings have on one another in the etiology of severe psychological disturbance, and it is here that Thompson locates an important philosophical inflection: Laing’s engagement with Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” and with the pre-Socratic term aletheia, truth as what emerges from concealment. Laing does not simply borrow Heidegger’s notion of truth, he twists it toward the interpersonal, emphasizing the interdependency between candor and secrecy, and thereby locating truth not as a detached property of propositions but as something that appears and recedes within conversation, within the fragile drama of what is disclosed and what is withheld.
This is where mystification becomes more than a provocative term, and becomes instead a conceptual instrument. Thompson underscores that Laing coined a vocabulary, terms such as collusion, mystification, injunction, untenable positions, and did so in order to name how ordinary interactions can distort truth so effectively that they affect each other’s reality, and therefore sanity. Thompson’s claim is not merely that Freud cared about deception and Laing cared about deception, but that Freud lacked this interpersonal vocabulary even where the problem was present, and that Laing supplies what psychoanalysis, in Thompson’s view, too often evaded: the possibility that pathology is not only a private compromise with desire, but also a response to a world in which reality is negotiated through power, denial, and coercive “care.”
Thompson’s account of Laing and Esterson’s family studies makes the clinical stakes concrete without collapsing them into accusation. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson demonstrate families in which massive forms of trickery and mystification are employed against the identified patient, sometimes with chilling casualness, and Thompson recounts the case of “Maya,” where parents deny to their daughter what they have openly admitted when she is absent, a denial that functions not simply as lying but as a systematic twisting of the child’s hold on reality. Thompson is careful to note the controversy that follows, and he observes that Laing did not claim that such incidents conclusively “cause” schizophrenia, only that they were ubiquitous in the families studied, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. He also insists that mystification is not unique to “pathological” families, because it is inherent in the hypocrisy of everyday life, and the difference is often one of degree, persistence, and consequence.
Laing’s later work extends the analysis to other relational fields, including couples. Thompson’s discussion of Interpersonal Perception is striking because it presents the book as “radical even now,” precisely insofar as it exposes how duplicity and deception can be woven into love relationships through confused communication patterns that resemble, in magnified form, what occurs in families of schizophrenics. Laing’s “politics of experience” then names the wider terrain: how others confirm or disavow my experience, how they determine what my experience is permitted to be, and how severe disturbance is not only an internal defect but can be the consequence of human deviousness, sometimes unwitting, sometimes masked as altruism. Thompson’s point, again, is not that the world is nothing but cruelty, but that truth is always vulnerable to being politicized, and that psychic life cannot be understood without acknowledging this vulnerability.
If “mystification in therapy” is to mean anything, then, it cannot mean only that patients lie, resist, or distort. It must also name the more uncomfortable possibility that therapy itself can become a site of mystification when the therapist uses interpretation to override experience, or uses technique as a way of winning, or treats the patient’s reality as raw material to be managed. Thompson’s Laing is not simply warning against bad clinicians, he is exposing a structural temptation within the therapeutic situation: the temptation to convert an encounter into an operation, and thereby to reproduce, under the banner of help, the very distortions that have injured the person’s relation to reality.
Truthfulness in psychoanalysis, not as virtue, but as condition
Thompson’s chapter culminates where it began, with ethics, though the ethics here is not an external code but the condition under which psychoanalysis remains psychoanalysis. He argues that if we hope to resolve the dilemma of living amid disappointment and betrayal, the first step is not to explain the person away but to have one’s experience of the past confirmed rather than dismissed as “pathology.” The clinical rationale is existential, because the wound is often compounded by the denial that the wound exists, and the denial becomes a second trauma, a forced estrangement from one’s own perception.
From this vantage, the ethic of truthfulness in psychoanalysis is not a moral ornament, and it is not reducible to the therapist’s sincerity. It is the scaffolding of the analytic relationship, and it binds the therapist as much as the patient. Thompson notes that therapists, in their zeal to effect change, can resort to questionable tactics and transform therapy into a contest where the clever protagonist “wins,” a perversion of the work that is especially insidious because it can masquerade as clinical effectiveness. Laing’s technique, Thompson suggests, can be reduced to a single preoccupying concern, how honestly therapists are behaving with their patients, and how honest they are capable of being, a concern he links explicitly to Freud’s “fundamental rule,” the pledge exacted from the patient to be candid about what comes to mind.
Thompson then refuses the easy fantasy that the fundamental rule is simply a compliance instruction. Freud discovered that patients are loathe to disclose, because disclosure threatens their secrets and what those secrets might reveal about themselves. Laing adds a different emphasis, that many patients have learned, through experience, that it is wrong to think or feel as they do, so that concealment is not merely defensive but historically instructed, and the person may have “forgotten” what they think and lost the sense of who they are. In that context, truthfulness is not an order one can give. It is a relationship one can slowly make possible, if and only if the therapist’s neutrality is not coldness but a form of acceptance, and if the encounter is grounded in mutual respect rather than coercion.
Thompson ends the chapter with Freud’s blunt warning, the line that is easy to quote and harder to live: “psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness,” and it is dangerous to depart from that foundation. The point is not sanctimony. It is that psychoanalysis, when it is faithful to itself, cannot proceed by lies and pretenses without betraying its own authority, because the authority at stake is not social status but the credibility of the relationship in which truth can be spoken.
For existential psychoanalysis, this returns us to the first problem, the fragility of reality. If psychotics are not only anxious but confused, then the imperative is to understand the nature of their confusion and to avoid doing or saying anything that increases it, which means that deception, whether in the family, in the culture, or in the consulting room, cannot be treated as peripheral. Thompson recounts Laing’s insistence that victims of duplicity can be devastated when truth is discovered after long concealment, because they can feel as though their reality has been taken from their grasp, leaving them lost between the world they thought was real and the world that is suddenly thrust upon them. In that light, therapy is not the imposition of a “correct” story but the slow repair of a person’s relation to reality, which is also the slow repair of a person’s capacity to trust experience without surrendering it to someone else’s authority.
Conclusion
Chapter 11 is not merely a comparison of Laing and Freud, and it is not a rehabilitation of Laing through Freudian credentials. It is a meditation on deception as an existential force, on trauma as what happens when reality becomes unstable, and on truthfulness in psychoanalysis as the ethical core without which technique becomes, at best, empty, and at worst, an instrument of mystification. Thompson’s contribution is to show that Laing’s work does not stand outside psychoanalysis as an ethical protest, but stands inside it as a demand for fidelity to experience, and as a warning about what happens when care becomes a vehicle for disconfirmation.
At Free Association Clinic, this question remains central to our understanding of depth psychotherapy, whether the struggle presents as anxiety, depression, relational deadlock, or the more diffuse suffering of not having one’s experience believed. If you want to learn more about our psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy services, or about how these questions appear in the work of couples therapy, you can also contact us when you are ready for a conversation.
James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)
References
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1914/1957). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924/1961). The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). On the Essence of Truth. In Basic Writings (D. F. Krell, Ed.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self. Pantheon Books.
Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others (2nd rev. ed.). Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H., & Lee, A. R. (1966). Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research. Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., & Esterson, A. (1964/1971). Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin.
