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Thomas Stephen Szasz, anglicizzazione di Tomás István Szász , è stato uno psichiatra e attivista ungherese naturalizzato statunitense.

Fu professore emerito di psichiatria presso lo Health Science Center, della State University di New York, sede di Syracuse, famoso per essere uno dei principali critici dei fondamenti morali e scientifici della psichiatria, vicino alle convinzioni dell'antipsichiatria. Sostenne la liberalizzazione delle droghe, dei farmaci e la lotta all'istituto del manicomio e dell'ospedalizzazione forzata attuata nel sistema sanitario degli Stati Uniti, affermando che esistono malattie neurologiche, disordini comportamentali e problemi filosofico-esistenziali, ma non malattie "mentali" in senso stretto, che lui considerava un'invenzione della psichiatria, alla cui pratica non era però contrario se consensuale.

I suoi due libri più noti sono Il mito della malattia mentale e The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, che espongono alcuni degli argomenti cui è più associato.

Le sue posizioni politiche e sociali sono invece spesso avvicinate al libertarianismo, al miniarchismo o al libertarianismo di sinistra, anche se si inseriscono direttamente nel solco del liberalismo classico, riprendendo anche alcune posizioni dell'utilitarista John Stuart Mill sul rispetto dell'individuo come obbligo da parte della società. Pur non essendo contrario a uno stato sociale minimo, ammonì in Farmacrazia, medicina e politica in America, a prestare attenzione di non trasformare il welfare state in uno Stato terapeutico. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. Aprile 1920 – 8. Settembre 2012  •  Altri nomi Thomas Stephen Szasz
Thomas Szasz photo
Thomas Szasz: 82 citazioni15 Mi piace

Thomas Szasz frasi celebri

“La gente spesso dice che questa o quella persona non ha ancora trovato se stessa. Ma 'se stessi' non è qualcosa che si trova, è qualcosa che uno si crea.”

Thomas Szasz

libro Il secondo peccato

“Lo stupido non perdona né dimentica. L'ingenuo perdona e dimentica. Il saggio perdona ma non dimentica.”

Thomas Szasz

Origine: Da The Second Sin https://equalityfiles.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/thomas_szasz_the_second_sin.pdf, 1973, in "Personal Conduct", p. 51.

“Masturbazione: la prima attività sessuale dell'umanità. Nel diciannovesimo secolo era una malattia; nel ventesimo una cura.”

Thomas Szasz

“Se parli a Dio, stai pregando; se Dio parla a te, sei affetto da schizofrenia. Se i morti ti parlano, sei uno spiritista; se tu parli ai morti, sei uno schizofrenico.”

Thomas Szasz

Origine: Da Il secondo peccato, 1973.

Thomas Szasz Frasi e Citazioni

“Il proverbio suggerisce di non mordere la mano che ti nutre. Ma forse dovresti farlo, se quella mano ti impedisce di nutrirti da solo.”

Thomas Szasz

Origine: Da Schizofrenia, traduzione di Orio Buonomini, Armando, 1984.

“Indipendentemente dal fatto che una persona sia considerata sana o matta di mente, una persona ha ragioni, non cause, delle proprie azioni.”

Thomas Szasz

Origine: Da Farmacrazia: medicina e politica in America.

Thomas Szasz: Frasi in inglese

“Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. xi.

“What had been drapetomania became depression. … Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.”

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Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

“As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 55.

“I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice… Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”

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Thomas Szasz

Preface to the Second Edition.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

“So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 170.

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.”

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Thomas Szasz

Revised edition, 1985. p. 175.
Ceremonial Chemistry (1974)

“The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 172.

“The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians.
Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.”

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Thomas Szasz libro The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.

“The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: Ceremonial Chemistry (1974), p. 11.

“Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Law", p. 40.
The Second Sin (1973)

“The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 168.

“For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Science and Scientism", p. 116.
The Second Sin (1973)

“Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: Anti-Freud (1990), pp. 56-57.

“The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 203.

“People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Second Sin (1973), p. 64.

“There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. … What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, … but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), pp. 208-209.

“Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear—particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 67.

“The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Second Sin (1973), p. 56.

“We speak of a person being “under the influence” of alcohol, or heroin, or amphetamine, and believe that these substances affect him so profoundly as to render him utterly helpless in their grip. We thus consider it scientifically justified to take the most stringent precautions against these things and often prohibit their nonmedical, or even their medical, use. But a person may be under the influence not only of material substances but also of spiritual ideas and sentiments, such as patriotism, Catholicism, or Communism. But we are not afraid of these influences, and believe that each person is, or ought to be, capable of fending for himself.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Second Sin (1973), pp. 65-66.

“The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 44.

“In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines “buggery” as “heresy, sodomy.””

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 165.

“Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Science and Scientism", p. 115.
The Second Sin (1973)

“The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.”

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Thomas Szasz

Origine: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

“Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. … With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.”

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Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 333.

“Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later — at least to those who come to believe in them — as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness — whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause — let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill?
In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth.”

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Thomas Szasz libro The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 113 http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Szasz/myth.htm

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