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This is a collection of essays by the famous anti-psychiatry psychiatrist, written over the past twenty-five years, on a variety of topics focused on current events, collected under eight headings such as Mental Illness, Mental Health Policy, The Insanity Defense, Psychiatry and Politics, etc. Szasz comments, often in only a few pages, on psychosurgery, involuntary hospitalization, electroshock, the Tylenol poisonings, Dan White, Hinckley, Martha Mitchell, Jim Jones, Ezra Pound, Soviet psychiatry, drug education and prohibition, and sex education, from a point of view that denies that mental illness exists and that regards the concept of mental illness as part of an ideology that has largely replaced moral and religious thinking. Because this ideology goes unrecognized as such, since it parades as science, Szasz contends, it not only usurps the role of moral deliberation, it oversteps the juridical limitations placed upon creeds for the sake of protecting individual rights.
Although his arguments are directed specifically against psychiatry, the ideology he attacks clearly includes psychoanalysis as well, even when the analysand freely elects to engage in it. Szasz raises basic questions about what it means to be mentally ill and to be cured that receive different answers from analysts who disagree on the relation between psychoanalysis and medicine and biology. Whatever the progress of this debate may be, Szasz performs an important function in helping analysts and analysands to recognize moral and political issues, not only in medical terms like “cure” but also in more favored psychoanalytic ones such as “good functioning,” “ego strength,” etc.
Drive theorists will be helped by Szasz's polemic to recognize that their therapy is a moral theory, albeit one based on biological assumptions. Freud's treatment of art, religion and civilization is not the accidental extension of a psychological theory to other fields but the inherent working out of an idea of human nature