Great Throughts Treasury

"Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity."

"'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing."

"Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to."

"Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit."

"Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification."

"Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions? Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as ?great historical figures.? I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language? In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society."

"Since the Freudian revolution, and especially since the Second World War, the secret formula has been this: If you want to debase what a person is doing, call his act psychopathological and call him mentally ill; if you want to exalt what a person is"

"Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors."

"Punishment is now unfashionable ... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility."

"So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)?so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self?mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution."

"Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person."

"Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere, by force, with a person?s decision to commit this act. The result is a far-reaching infantilization and dehumanization of the suicidal person."

"The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories."

"Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere."

"The ?treatment? can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual."

"The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts?just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions."

"The disease concept of homosexuality?as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide?conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ? Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy?just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics."

"The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God?s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders."

"The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point ? and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior ? smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians. Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?"

"The first fact is that there is no mental illness?. Although mental illness might have been a useful concept in the 19th century, today it is scientifically worthless and socially harmful."

"The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women."

"The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be ? namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense."

"The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms."

"The great shift? is the movement away from the value-laden languages of? the ?humanities,? and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the ?sciences.? This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is? especially important in psychology? and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore non-valuational semantic screen."

"The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic ? in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea ? known to medical science is work."

"The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, ?Jewish problem? was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; ?drug-abuse problem? is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs."

"The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship."

"The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr."

"The language of science?and especially of a science of man?is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity."

"The maliciousness of psychiatry is that it promotes itself as a medical discipline, although it is actually only part of the state authority.24 Therein"

"The notion of mental illness thus serves mainly to obscure the everyday fact that life for most people is a continuous struggle, not for biological survival, but for a ?place in the sun,? ?peace of mind,? or some other human value. For man aware of himself and of the world about him, once the needs for preserving the body (and perhaps the race) are more or less satisfied, the problem arises as to what he should do with himself. Sustained adherence to the myth of mental illness allows people to avoid facing this problem, believing that mental health, conceived as the absence of mental illness, automatically insures the making of right and safe choices in one?s conduct of life. But the facts are all the other way. It is the making of good choices in life that others regard, retrospectively, as good mental health!? Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by ?cure.? What we do have are problems in living?whether these be biologic, economic, political, or socio-psychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."

"The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds."

"The phrase ?The myth of mental illness? means that mental illness does not exist. The scientific concept of illness refers to a bodily lesion, that is, to a material?structural or functional?abnormality of the body, as a machine. This is the classic, Victorian, pathological definition of disease and it is still the definition of disease used by pathologists and physicians as scientific healers. The brain is an organ?like the bones, liver, kidney, and so on?and of course can be diseased. That?s the domain of neurology. Since a mind is not a bodily organ, it cannot be diseased, except in a metaphorical sense?in the sense in which we also say that a joke is sick or the economy is sick. Those are metaphorical ways of saying that some behavior or condition is bad, disapproved, causing unhappiness, etc. In other words, talking about ?sick minds? is analogous to talking about ?sick jokes? or ?sick economies.? In the case of mental illness, we are dealing with a metaphorical way of expressing the view that the speaker thinks there is something wrong about the behavior of the person to whom he attributes the ?illness.'"

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

"The proverb warnes you'',''dont bite the hand that feeds you,''but maybe you should,''if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

"The proverb warns; Don't bite the hand that feeds you. But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

"The self is not something that one finds, it is something that one creates"

"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive, but do not forget."

"The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are."

"The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else."

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim."

"There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy."

"There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts?and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. ? What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts? but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences."

"This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called ?mental illness??and its subspecies ?homosexuality??plays the same role today."

"We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age."

"We often speak of love when we really should be speaking of the drive to dominate or to master, so as to confirm ourselves as active agents, in control of our own destinies and worthy of respect from others."

"We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today."

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse."

"Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together."

"We speak of a person being ?under the influence? of alcohol, or heroin, or amphetamine, and believe that these substances affect him so profoundly as to render him utterly helpless in their grip. We thus consider it scientifically justified to take the most stringent precautions against these things and often prohibit their nonmedical, or even their medical, use. But a person may be under the influence not only of material substances but also of spiritual ideas and sentiments, such as patriotism, Catholicism, or Communism. But we are not afraid of these influences, and believe that each person is, or ought to be, capable of fending for himself."