Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Stephen Szasz) was an American academic, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth15 April 1920
CountryUnited States of America
A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.
Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.
The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ... Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.
No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.
There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself ... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
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.
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
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.