Szasz, Thomas Stephen

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SZASZ, THOMAS STEPHEN

SZASZ, THOMAS STEPHEN (1920–), U.S. psychiatrist and writer. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Szasz graduated from the Royal Hungarian Training Institute in Budapest shortly before the Nazi invasion of Austria prompted his family to move to the United States in 1938. He majored in physics at the University of Cincinnati and earned his M.D. degree in 1944. He then chose to specialize in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, training at the University of Chicago.

Szasz remained affiliated to the university's Institute for Psychoanalysis 1950–56, until he was appointed professor of psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center of the State University of New York.

Szasz was a prolific writer but became well-known and controversial through The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), which called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of psychiatry. He contended that conditions conventionally described by psychiatrists as "mental illness" were more properly characterized as "problems of living" and that the concept of "mental illness" was in fact faulty, insofar as labeling a mind as "sick" was a metaphorical imputation of qualities properly reserved for discussion of the body, wherein diagnosis could be based on actual physical evidence of disease.

The "myth" of which Szasz spoke was the mistaking of this metaphor for reality. He argued in Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (1963) that the designation of aberrant behavior as an illness facilitated social control and impinged upon individual freedom. Szasz also argued that, on a practical level, involuntary hospitalization discouraged people from seeking help for fear that they might fall victim to it.

Szasz argued that the essence of his work is "that we have to replace a theological outlook on life with a therapeutic one," with analyst and client working together to increase the latter's self-knowledge and understanding. In his Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1971), he developed the notion that repressive trends in psychiatry have their parallels in oppressive forces in the past. In 1970 he helped establish the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization. His critics argue that he underestimates the dangers inherent in allowing complete freedom of choice to mental patients or – another of his concerns – drug addicts.

After he retired from teaching, Szasz was named professor emeritus in psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center. In 1998 he received the Rollo May Award, presented by the American Psychological Association.

Szasz's other books include Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man (1970), Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers (1974), The Second Sin (1977), The Theology of Medicine (1977), The Myth of Psychotherapy (1978), The Therapeutic State (1984), Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1987), The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990), Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market (1992), A Lexicon of Lunacy (1992), The Meaning of Mind (1996), Faith in Freedom (2004), and Words to the Wise (2004).