Thomas Szasz Quotes - Page 5

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"?

Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person - so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.

The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

He who forgiveth, and is reconciled unto his enemy, shall receive his reward from God; for he loveth not the unjust doers.

By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.

The great shift... is the movement away from the value-laden languages of... the "humanities," and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the "sciences." This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is... especially important in psychology... and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" - or physical object - and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent...and remarkably popular products and practices.

We often speak of love when we really should be speaking of the drive to dominate or to master, so as to confirm ourselves as active agents, in control of our own destinies and worthy of respect from others.

Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy.

We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.