Thomas Szasz
The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Confused
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.Collection: Practice
How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?Collection: Real
Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Discipline
The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Love
Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.Collection: Devil
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Birth
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.Collection: Bipolar
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.Collection: Today
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.Collection: Self
People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.Collection: Dream
Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together.Collection: Strong
The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, "Jewish problem" was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; "drug-abuse problem" is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Suicide
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.Collection: Victim
It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.Collection: Age
Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a persons decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person.Collection: Suicide
Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose.Collection: Men
Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.Collection: Sleep
Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.Collection: Children
We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.Collection: Life Is
If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot. In either case, the crucial issue is our control of the other: the more we lose control over him, and the more he assumes control over himself, the more, in case of conflict, we are likely to consider him mad rather than just bad.Collection: Believe
After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.Collection: Self
Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists--be both.Collection: Disease
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.Collection: Errors
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"?Collection: Names
The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.Collection: Men
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.Collection: People
Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.Collection: Giving
Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Unhappy
So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.Collection: Men
Autonomy... is freedom to develop one's self - to increase one's knowledge, improve one's skills, and achieve responsibility for one's conduct. And it is freedom to lead one's own life, to choose among alternative courses of action so long as no injury to others results.Collection: Responsibility
Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.Collection: Children
There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts - and the traditional persecution of men for their religion... What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts... but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.Collection: Men
When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without "free choice." It is small wonder that people find "free choice" a confusing idea: "free choice" appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the "patient") does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Astrology
If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot.Collection: Believe
Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something - and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood.Collection: Believe
Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.Collection: Men