The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression

By Thomas Szasz

From the Preface: “When, more than twenty years ago, I began to work on The Myth of Mental Illness, I unwittingly undertook an enter­prise that assumed a life of its own. My initial aim was merely to demonstrate that mental illness was fake or meta­phorical illness and that psychiatry was fake or metaphorical medicine. But there was no stopping. I followed from this that men­tal hospitalization was not the therapeutic intervention it was officially claimed to be. If involuntary, as had been typical throughout the history of psychiatry, hospitalization was ex­pulsion from society; and if voluntary, as was sometimes the modern arrangement, then it was escape from society. Ac­cordingly, I next devoted myself to an examination and expo­sition of the complex historical, linguistic, moral, and socio­logical aspects of various psychiatric ideas and interventions, many of which are characterized by an insidious and per­vasive combination of disease with deviance, illness with im­morality, cure with control, treatment with torture. The present work is an effort to complete the demytholo- gizing of psychiatry begun inThe Myth of Mental Illness….”

NY. Doubleday. 1979. 268p. CONTAINS MARK-UP