About this title: This volume contains the earliest essays, going back more than thirty years, in which the author staked out his position on 'the nature, scope, methods, and values of psychiatry.'
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Doubleday Anchor books, Garden City, N.Y.
Date Published: 1970
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. 1970 Doubleday Anchor paperback. NOT EX LIB! Some yellow highlighting, bright pages, light reading wear, creased spine, covers have some edgewear, a little scuffing & small creases. 265 p. Includes bibliographical references. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: DoubleDay
Date Published: 1970-06
ISBN-13:9780385020336ISBN:0385020333
Description: Good. Binding is tight and square. Has some highlighting and/or underlining. An average used paperback with wear, corner bumps, small creases, light stains, etc. Careful packaging and fast shipping. We recommend PRIORITY MAIL for even faster delivery! read more
Edition: Softcover Edition
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr, Syracuse, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780815602569ISBN:0815602561
Description: Near Fine, Minor edge Rubbing in Remainder, never Read jacket. Softcover, never read, has minor edge rubbing and rem mark bottom. read more
Description: Very Good. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., [1970]. 1st Edition. [10]+265+[3]pp. 16mo. Small format paperback. A very good copy. Owner's ink signature to the title-page. 6.0 ounces = 171 grams. 7.2 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches = 18 x 10.5 x 1.5cm. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y.
Date Published: 1970
Description: Good. No dust jacket. Ex-library. Few library markings, clean text, tight binding. 265 p. 19 cm. Includes bibliographical references. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Doubleday
Date Published: 1970-06
ISBN-13:9780385020336ISBN:0385020333
Description: Like New. Doubleday. 1970 mass paper back book like New with no jacket as issued * looks never readfd Unmarked*Ships in a padded water tight bubble bag* All merchandise is fully guaranteed* Buy from a professional company that cares about your satisfaction*S. read more
Edition: First Pelican Edition.
Binding: Paper Back
Publisher: Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex
Date Published: 1974
ISBN-13:9780140218268ISBN:0140218262
Description: Nr Very Good. No Jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Spine slightly bowed. Pages yellowing. Pelican book no. A1826 254pp inc index. read more
Description: Paperback, very good plus condition, owner's written name. 254 pp. Fourteen essays in which the controversial psychiatrist encourages us to wage war on psychiatry used as a convenient way of avoiding confrontations with moral conflicts and social problems. read more
"Thomas Szasz defines the right of the anti-psychiatry movement as R.D. Laing defines the left...probably. A psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist and emeritus professor at SUNY, you'd think he had it made in the establishment and, financially speaking, he likely did. But still, almost everything Dr. Szasz has published has been a radical critique of psychotherapeutics, psychiatry and academic psychology. His heroes are the iconoclastic individualists, ranging from the economists von Mises and Hayek through Freud to...(and here is where the "probably" came from) the prominent socialists Wilhelm Reich and Jack London.
Although I do not subscribe to the ideal of an unfettered capitalism and find his occasional bows to such naive economic theory offputting, I believe that Szasz's regard for the likes of Reich, London and others of that ilk indicate that his primary values are in fact individual liberty and dignity, irrespective of age, race, gender, nation or any other predication. In that, we agree.
Having been trained to be a psychotherapist myself, I have found Szasz's books a vital corrective and caution to what I was taught and to how, in jobs of that sort, this was put into practice--so effective a caution that he probably contributed to my hesitation in pursuing such a career--that and the ugliness of taking money for such "work" (viz. socialistic tendencies), that is.
Szasz's attitude is best summed up in his book on Schizophrenia which I'll cover some time. Basically, he claims that psychiatric (not neurology's) nosology has the status of medieval demonology. In other words, there are no such things as schizophrenia, bipolarity, affective disorders, attention deficit disorders--not in any scientific sense, not in any way more significant than the distinctions between orders of demons. The reason for this claim is that these conditions have no known physical aetiology. Oh, they may have statistically mapable correlatives such as are revealed by various neuro-imaging techniques, but there's no known bug, no bacterium or virus or lesion which can be shown to cause them--not as, say, tertiary syphillitic psychosis or certain forms of senile dementia can be demonstrated to have a material basis. The "causes" of such syndromes as come and go from one Diagnostic & Statistical Manual edition to another are instead, so far as we know, of a social and moral nature. Psychiatry is--or ought be--a moral, not a medical science.
Although emphasizing the rights of the client/patient and the duty of the psychiatrist to them, Szasz is not unmindful of the commonweal and of the rights of society. He has no problem with incarcerating those who are real threats to others--though he rejects the wholesale employment of insanity defenses and psychiatric imprisonment. Indeed, given the fact that institutional professionals will continue to serve their masters and that government has a role in protecting the masses from some antisocial behaviors, he makes the novel suggestion in his final essay that perhaps mental health professionals ought be distinguished as lawyers are, namely, as prosecuting (institutional) and defending (client-serving) psychotherapists."
"A concept with some validity, carried to the point of absurdity; the author takes the concept that societal standards sometimes determine whether people and their conduct are deemed sane or crazy, and pushes it to the point of arguing that because this is subjective, there is objectively no such thing as insanity, and any diagnosis of mental illness amounts to an act of oppression of the individual by the mob. Of course, there are situations in which people are truly, unquestionably, objectively delusional. Thomas Szasz needs to take some basic coursework in logic, because he's written a book-length faulty syllogism."
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