By Thomas Szasz
Photo Source: Unsplash, NCI
Excerpt from "Psychiatry, the Science of Lies" by Thomas Szasz, pages 38-39
People abhor being baffled by the dangers that face them, which is why they prefer false explanations to non and why we may fairly assert that people they prefer false explanations to none and why we may fairly assert that people have always “known” what causes disease: demons, witches, the breaking of taboo, the evil eye, wells poisoned by Jews, and most enduring, humoral imbalances, as taught by Hippocrates and Galden. Bizarre, unpredictable behaviors also baffle people and make them feel endangered. Attributing such conduct to mental illness comforts them. It is for this reason that people now “know” what causes mental disease - bad brains, bad genes, bad chemicals, bad societies, bad parents. The idea that there are no mental diseases discomforts people and is therefore rejected.
Although Freud liked to claim that he had distributed the sleep of mankind, the opposite is the case: he provided people with the comforts of a false explanation. This falseness has been and is the source of the considerable popularity of so-called Freudian ideas. In an early essay, titled “Hysteria” (1888), Freud writes:
A proper assessment and a better understanding of the disease [hysteria] only began with the works of Charcot and of the school of the Salpetriere inspired by him. Up to that time hysteria had been the bete noir of medicine. The poor hysterics, who in earlier centuries had been brunt or excorcized, were only subjected, in recent, enlightened times, to the curse of the ridicule; their states were deemed unworthy of clinical observation, being simulation and exaggerations. Hysteria is a neurosis in the strict sense of the word-that is to say, not only have no perceptible changes in the nervous system been found in this illness, but it is not to be expected that any refinement of anatomical techniques would reveal any such changes. Hysteria is based wholly and entirely on physiological modification of the nervous system.
Freud had not a scintilla of evidence for this assertion, which, however, was necessary for classifying hysteria as a a disease. Then, as now, when psychiatrists did not understand some aspect of human behavior, they glibly attributed it to “heredity” Freud did the same: “Hysteria” must be regarded as a status, a nervous disease, which produces outbreaks from time to time. The aetiology of the status hysteria is to be looked for entirely in heredity.
Freud insisted that neurosis is a disease, yet condemned the neurotic as a morally impaired person: “In a number of cases, to be sure, the hysteria is a manifested in permanent moral perversion.” Accordingly, he endorsed coercion rationale as cure: “The methods of earlier generations of physicians who treated hysteria manifestations in young people as naughtiness and weakness of will and threatened them with punishment) were not bad ones, though they were hardly based on correct view.”
How can such coercion and incorrect views impact your health? Why? What protections should be in place to prevent such activities?
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