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There are a number of reasons why this book is exceptional. In the ever-increasing tide of books on psychological themes it deserves careful and special attention. It has qualities which are unusual and ever more difficult to find in a work of its type. These qualities lie both in the content of the book and in its manner of presentation.
The manner of presentation should, I think, be dealt with first: Dr. Szasz is an Hungarian-derived-American psycho-analyst. He has not evidently had time to spoil the English tongue or choke it with cliché, jargon, or what Dr. Theodor Reik once called “psycho-anal-ese”. He writes simply and lucidly. He deals with fundamental problems, and remains clear and easy to follow because his thinking is fresh. He starts again, in this work, rather as a child might do, with no preconceived notions, and builds his argument slowly, taking help where he can find it and where he feels it is strictly relevant to his thought. There is an excellent bibliography containing some 230 references. In addition he turns for his basic premisses not to scientific (or exclusively) earlier psychological writers, but to philosophy. He also defines his terms before he uses them. This kind of presentation is so rare that I felt it worth commenting on at the beginning.
To come to the content of the book: Dr. Szasz presents a problem to the reviewer for many reasons that I have outlined. A careful argument can only be carefully read and digested. To abstract and abbreviate—the reviewer's task—is often to distort, and this author commands a respect which makes me hesitate to risk distorting him. Chiefly, the two philosophers whose help he seeks in approaching the problem are Bertrand Russell and Gilbert Ryle. Some of Russell's statements provide the cornerstones of Dr. Szasz's edifice. Russell states inimitably what is the difference between the data properly studied by physicists, or physicians, and the data properly studied by psychologists. He defines the former a