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Ideology and insanity. First published in U.S.A. 1970. London, Penguin Books, 1974. Pp. i-viii + 254. 60p.
The second sin. First published in the U.S.A. 1973. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Pp. i-xv + 121. £2.50.
Szasz is well known for his attacks upon the view that medical analogies are helpful in the approach to psychological disorder and ‘dis-ease’. For him the concept of ‘mental illness’, by obscuring the issues, opens the way to a tyrannous imposition, on the part of psychiatrists, of treatment and/or hospitalization upon those relations, associates, colleagues or political opponents who are disapproved of or even disagreed with. Szasz argues that the concepts of psychobiology and psychopathology are unhelpful concepts, and that, in the so-called neuroses and psychoses, we are really faced, simply, with alternative ways of living. This fact would demand tolerance, permissiveness and clarity of thought, if 1984 is not to come upon us, when ‘the principal requirement for the position of Big Brother may be an M.D. degree’ (Ideology and insanity, p. 137, and The second sin, p. 121).
Szasz's fear of tyranny and high evaluation of the development of the autonomous personality (cp. his opening aphorism, in The second sin, ‘Childhood is a prison sentence of twenty-one years,’ p. 1) represents one master motif behind all his writing. The other is a horror of confused thought and a passionate longing for the sort of clarity whereby everyone knows where he is. Thus The second sin is a collection of aphorisms reminiscent of, if not as elegant as, the clarté française of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Voltaire. The result is that, on subjects where the aphorism can illuminate, Szasz can be striking and wise, but where the aphoristic form is inapplicable he can become shallow if not banal.
It is difficult not to speculate about the degree to which much of this results from prolonged struggles with parents and/or parental internal objects together with authoritarian politic