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Thomas Stephen Szasz, né Tamás István Szász le 15 avril 1920 à Budapest et mort le 8 septembre 2012 à Manlius dans l'État de New York, est un psychiatre et professeur émérite de psychiatrie hongrois à la SUNY Upstate Medical University à Syracuse.

Contestataire et critique de la morale et des fondations scientifiques de la psychiatrie, il exprime ses idées dans de nombreux ouvrages comme The Myth of Mental Illness publié en 1961 ou The Manufacture of Madness publié en 1970. Thomas Szasz est l'un des penseurs de l'antipsychiatrie.

Sa lutte libertarienne se rapporte à la médecine en particulier et de manière plus générale à la primauté des relations contractuelles de toute sorte entre individus majeurs. Cela l'amène à aborder d'autres thématiques comme la sexualité, les drogues ou le suicide. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. avril 1920 – 8. septembre 2012  •  Autres noms Thomas Stephen Szasz
Thomas Szasz photo
Thomas Szasz: 97 citations0 J'aime

Thomas Szasz citations célèbres

“Il suffit pour réussir dans le jeu de la vie de "jouer un rôle" et d'obtenir l'approbation sociale pour ce rôle.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Tout individu est "quelqu'un". Il ne peut demeurer non classé. L'individu éclectique dans ses choix et dans sa conduite, impossible à ranger dans les cases de la société, devient un objet de soupçon et de méfiance.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“La psychiatrie est liée de manière beaucoup plus intime à la morale que ne l'est la médecine en général.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Tout jugement est sujet à l'erreur.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Raisons et causes opèrent, pour ainsi dire, dans un champs éthiquement neutre, tandis que les motifs et les justifications sont utilisés dans un contexte qui entretient plus ou moins explicitement des considérations éthiques.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Ce dont il faut se rappeler, c'est que plus l'image qu'une personne a d'elle-même est abîmée et vulnérable, plus son besoin de la sauvegarder et de la renforcer sera grand.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

Thomas Szasz Citations

“La manière la plus simple pour l'opprimé d'améliorer son sort, c'est presque toujours de changer le règles du jeu de la vie en établissant de nouvelles règles qui lui sont favorables.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Le fait que l'on utilise l'énergie atomique à des fins guerrières ne transforme pas les conflits internationaux en problèmes de physique; de même, le fait que le comportement humain utilise le cerveau ne transforment pas les conflits moraux et personnels en problèmes de médecine.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Les hommes désirent la liberté, mais en même temps, ils la craignent.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“On a l'habitude de définir la psychiatrie comme une spécialité médicale qui s'intéresse à l'étude, au diagnostic et au traitement de la maladie mentale. Cette définition est fallacieuse et fausse. La maladie mentale est un mythe. Les psychiatres ne s'intéressent pas plus à la maladie mentale qu'à son traitement. Dans la pratique, ils ont affaire à des problèmes personnels, sociaux et éthique de l'existence.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Plus l'écart entre les prescriptions morales et le comportement social réel est grand, plus se fait sentir le besoin de sacrifier des boucs émissaires afin de maintenir le mythe social selon lequel l'homme vit selon les éthiques qu'il professe officiellement.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“L'oppresseur dispose d'une rhétorique justificative par laquelle il cache sous une fausse représentation ses buts véritables et les méthodes qu'il emploie pour les atteindre.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Le langage à trois fonctions principales : transmettre une information, induire un état et pousser à l'action.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“La médecine est une science naturelle. La psychiatrie est une science morale.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Quand des individus veulent en exclure d'autres de leur milieu, ils leur appliquent des étiquettes infamantes.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Ce n'est donc pas que les diagnostics psychiatriques soient dépourvus de sens; ce qui est grave, c'est qu'ils peuvent être utilisés et ils le sont souvent comme des assommoirs sémantiques : briser la respectabilité et la dignité d'un individu le détruit tout aussi efficacement, sinon plus, que de briser sa nuque.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et folie, 1970

“Le but implicite de la communication est d'obtenir une aide.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“C'est ce qu'une personne à appris qui détermine ce qu'elle estime digne d'être réalisé ou de devenir le but de son existence.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Être humain, c'est avant tout un concept moral et psychologique.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“En fait, dans une certaine mesure, toute douleur constitue un signe iconique de tout autre. De même que dans l'image représentant un œuf, nous reconnaissons tous les œufs que nous ayons jamais vu, toute douleur dont nous faisons l'expérience est partiellement constituée de toutes les douleurs que nous ayons jamais ressenties.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“La collectivisation de l'homme, par des moyens politiques ou psychiatriques, équivaut toujours à ceux-ci : les individus transformés en chose peuvent être contrôlés et manipulés par une élite technocratique.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Un homme complètement dénué d'espoir est une impossibilité psychologique, tout comme un homme n'ayant aucun but.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Le sentiment de la honte est étroitement lié à ce que les autres pensent de nous.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Dans une relation fort-faible, seul le membre faible de la pair a besoin de craindre de susciter l'envie de son partenaire; le fort n'éprouve pas en effet de crainte analogue, car il sait que le faible est sans pouvoir pour agir de manière aussi destructrice à son égard.”

Thomas Szasz

Le Mythe de la maladie mentale , 1961

“Il n'y a pas d'action visant à atteindre un but, il n'y a que des comportements déterminés par des causes.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“La classification est un acte social. La classification des individus ou des groupes requiert la participation de trois types de personnes au moins : le classificateur, l'objet classifié et un public qui accepte ou qui rejette telle ou telle classification.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et Folie, 1970

“Ceux qui sont habitués à être surveillés vivent comme s'ils étaient sur une scène; ils ont appris à se cacher sous un masque impersonnel. Seuls, sans public, sans surveillance, ils se rencontrent eux-mêmes, et, ayant rencontrés un fantôme, ils sont terrifiés.”

Thomas Szasz

Idéologie et folie, 1970

Thomas Szasz: Citations en anglais

“Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. xi.

“What had been drapetomania became depression. … Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.”

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Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

“As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 55.

“I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice… Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”

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Thomas Szasz

Preface to the Second Edition.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 170.

“It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped?
One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults.
Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man.
Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

“Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.”

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Thomas Szasz

Revised edition, 1985. p. 175.
Ceremonial Chemistry (1974)

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

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 172.

“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?”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“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 sociopsychological. 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.”

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Thomas Szasz livre The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: Ceremonial Chemistry (1974), p. 11.

“Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Law", p. 40.
The Second Sin (1973)

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 168.

“For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Science and Scientism", p. 116.
The Second Sin (1973)

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), pp. 56-57.

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

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 203.

“People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 64.

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), pp. 208-209.

“Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear—particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 67.

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

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 56.

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), pp. 65-66.

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

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Thomas Szasz

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 44.

“In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines “buggery” as “heresy, sodomy.””

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 165.

“Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control.”

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Thomas Szasz

"Science and Scientism", p. 115.
The Second Sin (1973)

“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.”

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Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

“Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.”

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Thomas Szasz

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

“For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. … With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.”

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Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 333.

“Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later — at least to those who come to believe in them — as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness — whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause — let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill?
In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth.”

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Thomas Szasz livre The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 113 http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Szasz/myth.htm

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