Laing and Szasz: Anti-psychiatry, Capitalism, and Therapy

[Laing] places himself squarely midstream of the main current of contemporary thought and sentiment about “health care.” This current, in both communist and capitalist countries is now fully Marxist—adopting, for “suffering situations,” the famous formula: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” —Thomas Szasz, Schizophrenia

Laing's criticism of the existing social order is similar, in all essential respects to that of Marxism and Communism.

—Thomas Szasz, Schizophrenia

For many, the names of Szasz and Laing are synonymous with the critiques of modern psychiatry that began in the 1960s and became bracketed under the rubric of “anti-psychiatry.” It may be surprising for some to learn that neither had any allegiance to the term—a phrase that was in fact coined by Laing's former colleague David Cooper (1967, 1968) to Laing's (1985) consternation:

I have never called myself an anti-psychiatrist, and have disclaimed the term from when first my friend and colleague, David Cooper, introduced it. However, I agree with the anti-psychiatric thesis that by and large psychiatry functions to exclude and repress those elements society wants excluded and repressed. If society requires such exclusion then exclusion it will get. Many psychiatrists want psychiatry to bow out of this function. In Italy,… some have done so; more would do so in other countries, but it is not easy. Such a complete change of policy requires as complete a change of outlook, and that is rare. (pp. 8-9)

Despite their common cause in attacking the medicalization of human distress and the coercive nature of psychiatry, Szasz has frequently expressed considerable antipathy toward Laing.