The strength of Laing is that he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity “more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial, estranged from his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.

¶ 4:42 PM