Frasi di Thomas Szasz

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“Nel passato, gli uomini creavano le streghe, ora creano malati mentali.”

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

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

“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.”

“Un bambino diventa un adulto quando realizza che ha il diritto non solo di essere giusto ma anche di sbagliare.”

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

“Nel regno animale la legge è mangiare o essere mangiati; nel regno umano, definire o essere definiti.”

“Due errori non fanno una cosa giusta, ma fanno una buona scusa.”

“Quando una persona non sa più ridere di se stesso, è il momento per gli altri di ridere di lui.”

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

“Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.”

“Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions?””

“The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.”

“This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called “mental illness”—and its subspecies “homosexuality”—plays the same role today.”

“Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity.”

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

“As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.”

“The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.”

“Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession.”