Ronald D. Laing's study on forms of human experience demonstrates how social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches can help understand societal structures. For him, psychological defects are not issues of the individual, but rather reactions of subjects to disease-inducing societal structures; psychiatry merely individualizes the problem. Only when individuals—who are ultimately all members of bourgeois society—become truly aware of themselves and their counterparts through experience in an empathetic sense can the state of the flawed whole be overcome.