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The subtitle of this book gives a clue to what avenues will be traveled, traversed, and utilized in the elaboration of the author's thesis that psychotherapy is a mirage. Although he discusses psychotherapy primarily, Szasz takes time to impugn the various somatic approaches—past and present—in psychiatry. He starts with Mesmer and magnetism, proceeds to Heinroth and then to Erb, Wagner-Jauregg, and Freud. It is on Sigmund Freud that Thomas Szasz really focuses. He laboriously dissects Freud, the man who “invented” psychoanalysis. He even uses psychoanalytic thinking to attack him.
This book is not just a diatribe against prominent personalities, although one might easily be inclined to view it in this light. Szasz's reasoning is not paralogical or asyndetic. He is not someone whose observations can be dismissed with a snide comment. The man whose fetish it is to disparage him will probably manifest only his own idiosyncratic position and thereby detract from himself. Szasz does more than touch upon topics. He raises questions that the thinking man must ponder. For instance, the analyst's claim that he exerts no suggestive influence on his patient, Szasz likens to the merchant's “soft sell.”
Szasz introduces subjects with eclat but subdued drama. He is not given to writing dry, dusty words. He is neither bashful nor afraid. In the chapter entitled, “Psychoanalysis as Base Rhetoric,” he talks of Freud's essay on Leonardo da Vinci as “that pioneer exercise in psychoanalytic character assassination which has become the model for modern psychohistorians.” Would someone like Erik H. Erikson smile or frown?
Wilhelm Erb seems to receive signal attention because he was the author of Handbuch der Elektrotherapie, the famous and influential textbook of “modern” electrotherapy published in Leipzig in 1881. In this chapter, Szasz comments on how psychiatrists were then deceiving the public and perhaps themselves about “the finer nutritive disturbance of the nervous apparatus,” whi