In this brilliantly original and highly accessible work, Thomas Szasz demonstrates the futility of analyzing the mind as a collection of brain functions. Instead of trying to unravel the riddle of a mythical entity called the mind, Szasz suggests that our task should be to understand and judge persons always as moral agents responsible for their own actions, not as victims of brain chemistry. This is Szasz's most ambitious work to date. In his best-selling book, "The Myth of Mental Illness," he took psychiatry to task for misconstruing human conflict and coping as mental illness. In "Our...
In this brilliantly original and highly accessible work, Thomas Szasz demonstrates the futility of analyzing the mind as a collection of brain func...
The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best and, more often, utterly fallacious. To make matters worse, it is likely to be supported as truth and wisdom by religious and scientific authority, intellectual fashion and social convention. In Words to the Wise, Thomas Szasz offers a compendium of thoughts, observations, and aphorisms that address our understanding of a broad range of subjects, from birth to death.
In this book, Szasz tackles a problem intrinsic to the human...
The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best ...
Thomas Szasz is renowned for his critical exploration of the literal language of psychiatry and his rejection of officially sanctioned definitions of mental illness. His work has initiated a continuing debate in the psychiatric community whose essence is often misunderstood. Szasz's critique of the established view of mental illness is rooted in an insistent distinction between disease and behavior. In his view, psychiatrists have misapplied the vocabulary of disease as metaphorical figures to denote a range of deviant behaviors from the merely eccentric to the criminal. In A Lexicon of...
Thomas Szasz is renowned for his critical exploration of the literal language of psychiatry and his rejection of officially sanctioned definitions of ...
Originally called mad-doctoring, psychiatry began in the seventeenth century with the establishing of madhouses and the legal empowering of doctors to incarcerate persons denominated as insane. Until the end of the nineteenth century, every relationship between psychiatrist and patient was based on domination and coercion, as between master and slave. Psychiatry, its emblem the state mental hospital, was a part of the public sphere, the sphere of coercion.
The advent of private psychotherapy, at the end of the nineteenth century, split psychiatry in two: some patients continued to be...
Originally called mad-doctoring, psychiatry began in the seventeenth century with the establishing of madhouses and the legal empowering of doctors...
The essays assembled in this volume reflect my long-standing interest in moral philosophy and my conviction that the idea of a medical ethics as something distinct and separate from ethics is an absurdity. Every person who acts is a moral agent. A person who possesses special knowledge and skills and is expected to act in the face of life-threatening circumstances--such as a physician--is someone whose status as moral agent is accordingly greatly enhanced. From the preface by the author.
The essays assembled in this volume reflect my long-standing interest in moral philosophy and my conviction that the idea of a medical ethics as somet...
In this book, I propose to describe psychotherapy as a social action, not as healing. So conceived, psychoanalytic treatment is characterized by its aim--to increase the patient's knowledge of himself and others and hence his freedom of choice in the conduct of his life; by its method--the analysis of communications, rules, and games; and lastly, by its social context--a contractual, rather than a 'therapeutic, ' relationship between analyst and analysand.
In this book, I propose to describe psychotherapy as a social action, not as healing. So conceived, psychoanalytic treatment is characterized by its a...
In this work Dr. Szasz dispels popular and scientific confusion about what pain and pleasure actually are. Demonstrating the doubtful value of such distinctions as "real" and Imagined" pain, or "physical" and "intellectual" pleasure, he analyses the basic concepts-psychological, philosophical, and sociological-involved in bodily feelings and discusses how these feelings are communicated. Some of the subjects discussed in Pain and Pleasure include: self-mutilation, sexual satisfaction, "hysterical anesthesia," false pregnancy, laughter, homosexuality, and dream analysis.
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In this work Dr. Szasz dispels popular and scientific confusion about what pain and pleasure actually are. Demonstrating the doubtful value of such...
Szasz troubles the dark, still waters of psychiatry and the law. He peeps beneath the crazy quilt of federal and state procedures which render impotent the constitutional right to a speedy and public trial.
Szasz troubles the dark, still waters of psychiatry and the law. He peeps beneath the crazy quilt of federal and state procedures which render impoten...
Dr. Thomas Szasz on the shortcomings of commitment procedures, and the inadequacies of protections afforded patients in psychiatric institutions. He alerts us to the existing and potential abuses of human rights in mental health programs and procedures.
Dr. Thomas Szasz on the shortcomings of commitment procedures, and the inadequacies of protections afforded patients in psychiatric institutions. H...
