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