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Curr Psychol (2008) 27:79101
DOI 10.1007/s12144-008-9024-z
Thomas Szasz
Published online: 29 April 2008# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract The term psychiatry refers to two radically different ideas and practices: curinghealing souls and coercingcontrolling persons. It is important that critics of psychiatry clarify whether they object to the former or the latter or both, and why. Because I believe coerced psychiatric relations are like coerced labor relations called slavery, and like coerced sexual relations called rape, I spent the better part of my professional life criticizing involuntary-institutional psychiatry and the insanity defense. In 1967, my effort to undermine the medical-political legitimacy of the term mental illness and the moral-legal legitimacy of depriving individuals of liberty by means of psychiatric rationalizations suffered a serious blow: the creation of the antipsychiatry movement. Despite their claims, antipsychiatrists rejected neither the idea of mental illness nor coercion practiced in the name of treating mental illness. Sensational claims about managing schizophrenia and pretentious pseudophilosophical pronouncements diverted attention from the crucial role of the psychiatrist as an agent of the state and as an adversary of the denominated patient. The legacy of the antipsychiatry movement is the creation of a catchall term used to delegitimize and dismiss critics of psychiatric fraud and force by labeling them antipsychiatrists.
Keywords Antipsychiatry. Ronald D. Laing . David Cooper . Clancy Sigal . LSD . Psychiatric coercions . Psychiatric excuses
Words are the only things that last forever.
William Hazlitt (17781830)1
1http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/William.Hazlitt.Quote.9945
Web End =http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/William.Hazlitt.Quote.9945 ; http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Hazlitt/Quotes.htm
Web End =http://www.blupete.com/Literature/ http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Hazlitt/Quotes.htm
Web End =Biographies/Literary/Hazlitt/Quotes.htm .
T. Szasz (*)
Psychiatry Emeritus, 4739 Limberlost Lane, Manlius, NY 13104-1405, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Debunking Antipsychiatry: Laing, Law, and Largactil
80 Curr Psychol (2008) 27:79101
Section 1
The term anti-psychiatry was created by David Cooper (19311986), a collaborator and friend of Ronald David Laing (19271989), and was first used in Coopers (1967) book, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. Cooper does not define the term. The closest he comes to identifying anti-psychiatry is the following: We have had many pipe-dreams about the ideal psychiatric, or rather anti-psychiatric, community (Cooper 1967, p. 104). Who are the we?
This question is answered in The Dialectics of Liberation (1968), edited by Cooper with the lead chapter by Laing. In the Introduction, Cooper writes: The...