SOURCE: "The Politics of Dialogue: Ronald Laing," in Contemporary Psychology: Revealing and Obscuring the Human, Duquesne University Press, 1984, pp. 107-16.

Friedman is an American educator who has written extensively on philosophy, religion, and psychology, including several books about the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. In the following excerpt, he examines Laing's views on the relation of the individual to the "other," comparing them with similar ideas found in the writings of Buber, Rollo May, and other psychologists, philosophers, and theologians.

"More significant than the issue between atheist and theological existentialists," I have written in my chapter on "The Existentialist of Dialogue" in To Deny Our Nothingness, "is the issue between those existentialists who see existence as grounded in the self and those who see it as grounded in the dialogue between person and person." Existential and humanistic psychotherapists may also be roughly divided along these lines. Except...