In a rare psychoanalytic case history, Thomas Szasz presents Recollections of a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: The Case of “Prisoner ‘K'”. In it, Szasz gives us an opportunity to see how he actually practiced psychotherapy.
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I read the book, Out of the Box, Ron Leifer’s autobiography, to learn more about Leifer’s association with Thomas Szasz. I wanted to find out, what if anything, Leifer learned while studying under Szasz during medical school.
The book, The Happiness Project, is written by a student of Thomas Szasz, Ron Leifer. I was disappointed in this book. I was interested in the work of Ron Leifer because he studied under Thomas Szasz. I thought that perhaps Ron could offer some insights into the human condition. What I found were some poorly constructed, trite thoughts about about human nature.
My book, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: A Short Guide to REBT was just released on Audiobook. Listen to the above sample. If you’d like a free copy in exchange for a review, please contact me.
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In the above Mad In America podcast interview, classics professor Michael Fontaine discusses what the ancient world can teach us about the causes and cures of mental illness.
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Psychoanalysis teaches, correctly enough, that neurotic symptoms are due to unresolved, unconscious conflict. However, it would be more accurate to say that neurotic symptoms are due to the fact that the subject (the so called “neurotic”) chooses indecisiveness in the face of conflict: confronted with the necessity of having to choose between two things both of which he wants but only one of which he can have, he refuses to choose, as if hoping that by waiting only a little longer he would be able to have both. In this sense, the neurotic is simply greedy, preferring the pain of his “symptoms” to that of consciously relinquishing something he wants.
-Thomas Szasz, Heresies
Animalism is the opposite of humanism. It is treating man as though he were an animal. Science, medicine, and especially psychiatry are often guilty of animalizing man. The theory and practice of conventional psychiatry are, at bottom, the expressions of this tendency. Mental illness is a distinctly human affair. But the more we insist that it is an “illness”-and the more we prove this by producing “experimental neuroses” in animals and by curing human neuroses by means of drugs and shocks and surgery-the more we bestialize, animalize man. Having reduced him to the level of animal, we expect him to act like one-unconcerned about past failures, misdeeds, and wasted opportunities and heedless of the future; in short, unreflective and “happy” – a veritable anti-Socrates.
– Thomas Szasz, Heresies
