Thomas Szasz Quotes
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Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are...
By Thomas Szasz
Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.
By Thomas Szasz
Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose, or, better still, jump in the water and swim for the shore.
By Thomas Szasz
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.
By Thomas Szasz
If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.
By Thomas Szasz
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.
By Thomas Szasz
Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.
By Thomas Szasz
Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.
By Thomas Szasz
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.
By Thomas Szasz
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
By Thomas Szasz
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.
By Thomas Szasz
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.
By Thomas Szasz
The proverb warns; Don't bite the hand that feeds you. But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
By Thomas Szasz
It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.
By Thomas Szasz
Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
By Thomas Szasz
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
By Thomas Szasz
The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
By Thomas Szasz
The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
By Thomas Szasz
The stupid neither forgive or forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
By Thomas Szasz
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
By Thomas Szasz
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
By Thomas Szasz
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
By Thomas Szasz
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
By Thomas Szasz