What is Psychiatry?

This essay was submitted for publication with Mad in America and rejected by Robert Whitaker.

What is Psychiatry?

What is psychiatry?  The American Psychiatric Association defines psychiatry as “the branch of medicine focused on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders.”  A psychiatrist, so the APA claims, “is a medical doctor (an M.D. or D.O.) who specializes in mental health, including substance use disorders,” and psychiatrists are “qualified to assess both the mental and physical aspects of psychological problems.”  On its surface, such definitions appear rational.  However, upon deeper inspection, nothing could be further from the truth.

The word “psychiatry” is derived from the ancient Greek terms “psyche,” meaning “soul,” and “iatrikos,” meaning “medical treatment.”  Thus “psychiatry” refers to the “medical treatment of the soul.”  Is this what the APA claims to accomplish?  Do psychiatrists treat the human soul with medicine?  For a psychiatrist to treat the human soul with medicine would first require that he or she possess knowledge concerning the human soul.  It would also require that he or she possess knowledge concerning medicines that treat the human soul.  Do psychiatrists possess knowledge of either of these things?  Of course not.

To borrow a phrase from the brilliant Thomas Szasz, psychiatry is, and always has been, the science of lies. (See here: https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/psychiatry-the-science-of-lies/ )  There is nothing remotely scientific or rational about psychiatry, and yet it poses as a medical profession with the authority to diagnose, treat, and prevent mental, emotional or behavioral disorders.  From whence this authority?  From whence this capacity to assess both the purported mental and physical aspects of psychological problems?  Even if the authority of psychiatry were legitimate, which it is not, what could it possibly mean for a psychiatrist to provide medical treatment for the human soul?  What are the disorders or problems that psychiatry claims to confront?  What is mental illness?

To borrow another phrase from the inimitable Thomas Szasz, mental illness is a myth. (See here https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/the-myth-of-mental-illness/ )  Simply put, there is no such thing as mental illness.  The alleged psychological problems and behavioral disorders that fall under the umbrella of “mental illness” are little more than the inventions of a group of sick-minded psychiatrists.  This is not to claim that human beings do not suffer from a wide variety of afflictions or debilitating symptoms.  Quite the contrary.  But the notion that the endless variety of human suffering is somehow reducible to “mental illness,” and that psychiatrists have special knowledge of “mental illness” is more than egregiously false.  It is a hoax of catastrophic proportions.

What, then, is psychiatry?  Psychiatry is the pseudo-scientific justification for slavery, abuse, torture, involuntary incarceration, forced drugging, ostracism, stigmatization, electroshock, lobotomy and murder.  As Szasz clearly understood, psychiatry is rationalized coercion and state sponsored violence.  It is institutionalized opposition to liberty and responsibility.  How can this be?  How is it possible for supposed experts in what is ostensibly a branch of medicine inflict so much harm on so many innocent people?  Furthermore, why would anyone perpetrate such horrendous crimes?  C.S. Lewis explains:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

When pharmaceutical robber baron’s team up with omnipotent moral busybodies, and when government bureaucracies lend their support, the result is that which the relentless Thomas Szasz aptly named the therapeutic state. (See here https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/the-church-of-america/ )  Psychiatry is a tyrannical arm of the therapeutic state that subjects citizens to its unholy dominion.  In the guise of a medical profession, psychiatry reduces its victims to docile and defenseless vassals of the therapeutic state.  If this is what is meant by the medical treatment of the soul, and it is, then vigilant citizens will do everything in their power to throw off the shackles of the therapeutic state by abolishing psychiatry along with its abhorrent collaborators.

If we wish to continue to live and act as free and responsible citizens, psychiatry, the science of lies, must be exposed for what it is.  The myth of mental illness must be overturned.  The therapeutic state must be conquered.  The false philosophies that undergird psychiatry must be annihilated or else the Hydra will grow new heads.  Until that time, psychiatrists will continue to masquerade as healers who treat the human soul with medicine.  Until that time, masses of innocent men, women and children will continue to suffer because of the deceptions of the science of lies, the illusions of the myth of mental illness, and the tyranny of the therapeutic state.

The Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project

Laura Delano is doing great work.  As a recovering victim of psychiatric abuse, she is a great advocate for those who similarly suffer.  She has recently introduced two great resources for recovering victims of psychiatry: The Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project.  She is also a powerful antipsychiatry activist.

Here is the official introduction to Delano’s initiatives:

Inner Compass Initiative (ICI) is a new 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides information and resources to help people make more informed choices regarding all things “mental health” and to support people who wish to leave, bypass, or build community beyond the mental health system. Its first major effort, The Withdrawal Project (TWP), is a comprehensive online hub for safer psychiatric drug withdrawal. The resources on the ICI and TWP websites include a detailed layperson’s “Companion Guide” to safer tapering from psychiatric medications; mini-booklets that provide detailed, critical information about psychiatric drugs, psychiatric diagnoses, and the mental health industry; and two networking platforms to help people who are thinking critically about the mental health system or seeking support for psychiatric drug withdrawal to find each other in their local communities.

Visit ICI at www.theinnercompass.org

Visit TWP at withdrawal.theinnercompass.org

Laura Delano

How to Get Off Psychoactive Drugs Safely

How to Get Off Psychoactive Drugs Safely is another resource for those who wish to safely withdraw from toxic psychotropic drugs.

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients, and Their Families

Peter Breggin’s recent book Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families is a great resource for victims of psychiatric drugging, abuse, and torture.  It is also a great resource for the families of those same victims of psychiatry.  As for prescribers, perhaps it will help them to stop prescribing toxic psychotropic drugs.  For therapists, perhaps it will open their eyes to the truth about psychiatry.

Psychiatric Drug withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families is an excellent book in terms of its candid approach to helping those who desire to withdraw from toxic psychotropic drugs.  But it is also an excellent book because it helps to expose the truth about psychiatry.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to undertake the often difficult task of withdrawing from toxic psychotropic drugs.

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Truth be told, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is one of my least favorite books by Thomas Szasz.  It was published in 1965, thus it pre-dates Szasz more lucid and mature reflexions on the true nature of psychiatry.

 

Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry

Thomas Szasz has written many great books, including The Myth of Mental Illness, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, and Coercion as Cure.  Nevertheless, Szasz’s Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry may be one of his best books.

“Comparing psychiatry with slavery,” Szasz writes in his preface, ” – implying that they are similar kinds of institutions and human relations – may, at first glance, seem bizarre, even obscene.  Psychiatry is good.  Slavery is evil.  But it is not that simple.” (p. xi)

No.  It’s not that simple.  In fact, as Szasz also notes in his preface, supporters of psychiatric slavery claim that they seek to liberate the mental patient from the shackles of his illness while doing precisely the opposite.  Moreover, abolitionists during the Civil War enjoyed a measure of esteem, whereas abolitionists of psychiatric slavery are often shunned and ridiculed.  “Unlike the numbers of people who supported the opponents of the Confederacy during the Civil War,” Szasz observes, “few support the opponents of psychiatric slavery.” (p. xi)

Is it really possible that psychiatry is an institution of oppression?  Is it possible that psychiatry is an any way comparable to chattel slavery?  Szasz explains that “the human rights violations of chattel slavery, the Inquisition, National Socialism, and Communism have been well documented.  My goal is to show that psychiatry – as the oppression of the patient by the psychiatrist, defined and justified as the patient’s liberation from an illness that robs him of freedom and responsibility – belongs in the pantheon of man’s inhumanity to man.” (p. xiii)

The first comparison that Szasz makes between chattel slavery and psychiatry is that for centuries people believed that “forcibly enslaving the Negro was good for the slave,” and that “forcibly treating the insane was good for the mental patient.” (p. 1)  In other words, coercion has often been justified as a form of benevolence.  This book should be read in its entirety by every lover of liberty.  The following passages serve as an introduction to Szasz’s excellent book Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry :

• “Psychiatric intolerance is one of the pillars of the therapeutic state.  Its trinity – psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric treatment, and psychiatric incarceration – is a mask for justifying coercion as care.  Rejecting psychiatric treatment and rejecting life (i.e. attempting suicide) are psychiatric heresies, punishable by psychiatric incarceration and involuntary psychiatric treatment.  Opposition to coercive psychiatric suicide prevention is reflexively dismissed as to lacking in compassion as to be unworthy of consideration.” (p. 4)
• “Psychiatric slavery – that is, confining individuals in madhouses – began in the seventeenth century, grew in the eighteenth, and became an accepted social custom in the nineteenth century.” (p. 5)
• “For more than forty years, I have maintained that psychiatric reforms are exercise in prettifying plantations.  Slavery cannot be reformed – it can only be abolished.  As long as the idea of mental illness connotes dangerousness and legitimizes psychiatric power exercised through preventive psychiatric detention, psychiatric slavery cannot be abolished.” (p. 5)
• “In short, I oppose psychiatric slavery because I believe it is inimical to individual liberty and responsibility, to the rule of law, and to the very existence of a free society.” (p. 6)
• “However, most people see psychiatry not as enslavement to a destructive ideology, but as liberation from a dangerous illness; they accept the claims that psychiatry is a medical science and psychiatric interventions are scientifically valid medical treatments of real diseases.  They do not see that the lot of psychiatric slaves is as miserable as ever, partly because they do not want to see it, and partly because making diagnoses and prescribing medications makes psychiatrists look like real doctors, who are perceived as intrinsically benevolent.  A study of patients’ attitudes toward physicians revealed that ‘Mostly patients trust doctors.'” (p. 6)
• “Formerly, mental patients were restrained physically, without the pretense of treatment; now, they are restrained chemically, and this pharmacological restraint masquerades as treatment.  Formerly, the madman incarcerated in the madhouse was perceived as an incompetent person with an incurable illness; now, he is perceived as a dangerous patient suffering from a treatable illness, but lacking insight into his condition and hence requiring treatment against his will.” (p. 7)
• “Overwhelming support for psychiatric slavery, by public policy and public opinion alike, deprives the critic of a forum for effective dissent, regardless of the absurdity of the claim he criticizes.” (p. 7)
• “Coercive psychiatric practices are now more common, affect more persons, and are believed to be better justified than they have ever been.” (p. 8)
• “We have come a long way since the days when insanity was considered incurable.  Considering insanity curable has made the insane person’s situation worse, not better.  As long as the psychiatrist believed that insanity was incurable, that patients were, to some extent, protected from the psychiatrist’s furor therapeuticus.  Conversely, the more obsessed the psychiatrist  becomes with his power to defeat mental illness, the more enraged he becomes by the patients’ rejection of treatment.  Thus, some of the worst abuses of psychiatry have been committed in the name of psychiatric treatment, such as insulin coma therapy, electric shock treatment, and lobotomy.  Today, we can add psychotropic drugs to that list.” (p. 8-9)
• “Deinstitutionalization – a euphemism for the forcible eviction of the mental patient from the mental hospital – was followed by laws mandating ‘outpatient commitment’ – another euphemism, for forcing the patient to ingest psychiatric drugs while ‘living in the community.’  This sequence of events resembles the Jim Crow laws after the ‘liberation’ of slaves by the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment.  In each case, members of the stigmatized and oppressed class are nominally liberated from their shackles, making them free and equal in theory, only to be re-oppressed by a new set of laws and policies, making them once again unfree and unequal in practice.” (p. 11)
• “Before concluding these introductory remarks, I want to acknowledge that the comparison of psychiatric slavery with chattel slavery fails in one important respect.  From the earliest days of chattel slavery in America, many prominent members of the oppressor class felt a deep sense of guilt for the practice, which they recognized as a profound moral offense against the Negro slave, who humanity was self-evident.  The Declaration of Independence spelled the doom of chattel slavery.  More specifically, the deeds and words of the first three American presidents signified the recognition, among the leaders of the land, that slavery was, simply, wrong.  George Washington provided for the emancipation of his slaves in his will.  John Adams rejected owning slaves and declared: ‘Every measure of prudence ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery in the United States.’  Jefferson famously wrote, ‘I tremble for my country when I think that God is just,’ and stated that ‘it was among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country might be abolished by law.” (p. 11)
• “Neither in the United States nor anywhere else in the world have a significant number of persons expressed interest in securing freedom from coerced psychiatric meddling.  Quite the contrary.  Most Americans sincerely believe that expanding the scope of psychiatric slavery would benefit the country, just as most slaveholders in the early 1800s sincerely believed that expanding chattel slavery would benefit it.” (p. 12)
• “Much as slaveholders liked to view themselves as rescuing the Negro from savagery, psychiatrists like to view themselves as rescuing the involuntary patient from insanity.” (p. 12)
• “Chattel slavery was the original sin of the American ideal of individual liberty, a sin the nation has still been unable fully to expiate.  Psychiatric slavery, I shall argue, is the Achilles heel of that ideal, a fatal flaw that may yet transform the American dream into an American nightmare.” (p. 12)
• “Thus, for me, the most obvious thing about mental hospitals has always been that they are very bad places.  The persons locked up say that are bad and, to make matters worse, the persons who lock them up say they are good places, and that they are especially good for those who are locked up.” (p. 14)
• “By the time I was an adolescent, I concluded that people declared to be crazy are incarcerated because they embarrass their family; that removing them to insane asylums serves the interests of their relatives and other members of society; and, most importantly, that inquiring into the justification for locking up mad people is taboo.  Crazy people belong in madhouses.  Only a crazy person would ask, why?” (p. 14)
• “Well aware that asking such questions is taboo, an offense not only against psychiatry but also against conventional wisdom, I waited until I completed my psychiatric and psychoanalytic training before systematically addressing, and challenging, the practice of involuntary mental hospitalization.  I was not surprised to discover, in the 1950s, when I was gathering materials for what became The Myth of Mental Illness and Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry – that most psychiatric textbooks were silent on the subject of coercion.  Psychiatrists pretended that mental patients are admitted to state mental hospitals the same way that medical patients are admitted to regular hospitals.” (p. 15)
• “How are we to understand this history and this situation?  The best way to do so is by seriously scrutinizing the power of the psychiatrist to imprison and the status of the mental patient as prisoner – in short, by taking seriously the similarities between slavery and psychiatry.” (p. 15)
• “Chattel slavery is one of the oldest social institutions.  Psychiatric slavery is one of the youngest.  The basic element shared by both is the use of force by one person to make another do something against his will.  As long as an oppressive practice is customary, it is, by definition, acceptable; it may even be viewed as altruistic: the coercer is perceived as caring for, educating, or treating the coerced.” (p. 16)
• “The master coerced, controlled, and cared for his family and his slaves.  The psychiatrist is expected to, and is legally authorized to, coerce, control, and care for his patients.” (p. 16)
• “Throughout most of history, people viewed slavery as a socially necessary institution and … this perception was shared by both masters and slaves.  The same is now true for psychiatric slavery.” (p. 17)
• “No one contests that coercive police practices serve the interests of the community and not the interests of the persons detained by the police.  However, few concede that coercive psychiatric practices serve the interests of the community and not the interests of persons detained by psychiatrists.  This denial legitimizes the consequences of psychiatry’s two paradigmatic procedures, civil commitment and the insanity defense.” (p. 17)
• “Psychiatrists have long had a veritable love affair with coercion as benevolence.  The modern psychiatrist’s love for using force to ‘help’ patients knows no bounds.” (p. 18)
• “Clearly, having involuntary patients is useful for psychiatrists and many others as well.  To be sure, psychiatric slaves are useful in a different way than were chattel slaves.  For millennia, labor was scarce and mass poverty was the norm: slave-laborers were needed to produce goods and services.  Slavery was feudalism write large.  Slaves, laboring in the fields and the homes, were producers of goods and services; their social status, however, was that of dependents (they were the prototypical ‘child-workers’).  Today, in advanced societies, labor is plentiful and the state is Croesus: slave-patients are needed to produce work and jobs for others.  Psychiatric slavery is statism write large.  Psychiatric slavery is statism writ large.  Psychiatric slaves, treated in hospitals, clinics, and the offices of mental health professionals, are consumers (of health care services); their social status, however, is that of dependents (they are incompetent, insane, non-responsible.)” (p. 18-19)
• “Slavery and psychiatric treatment rest on coercion; voluntary labor and medical treatment rest on cooperation.  The psychiatrist-slaveholder views his patient as an individual deprived of moral agency by mental illness; the patient requires treatment against his will, for his own benefit.  The contractual medical doctor views his patient as a moral agent, possessing the same rights and responsibilities as he does; each is free from coercion by the other, and each is responsible for his own behavior.” (p. 19)
• “Herein lies the fundamental similarity between the slave and the involuntary mental patient: both reject the ‘care’ imposed on them by their self-appointed benefactors.” (p. 20)
• “Everyone wants to be believe that one’s own behavior is morally praiseworthy, especially if the individual profits from it economically and existentially.  Thus, persons whose work depends on the routine use of coercion – for example, policemen, judges, Internal Revenue Service agents – believe that the force they exercise is justified because it is necessary and beneficial for society.  Appropriately, the law calls this principle ‘police power.'” (p. 20)
• “Psychiatric historians and psychiatric practitioners deny the ongoing psychiatric holocaust.  Journalists and the public, fearing to appear ignorant of the widely celebrated scientific advances in psychiatry, do not challenge its diagnoses allegedly based on brain scans, and its claims for cures attributed to neuropsychopharmacological miracle drugs.  How are we to explain this?  Understanding the concept of legal fiction – and, specifically, its use to legitimize chattel slavery in the past, and psychiatric slavery now – goes a long way toward answering that question.” (p. 22)
• “Everyone who makes use of mental health laws and practices – perhaps most importantly the relatives of mental patients – needs the fiction of mental illness, with its implications of disease, dangerousness, and incompetence, to help him perceive responsible adults as if they were helpless infants.” (p. 24)
• “Before slavery could be abolished, its rationalizations based on Scripture, genetics, and paternalism had to be undermined.  Abolitionists accomplished that goal.  Similarly, before psychiatric slavery can be abolished, its rationalizations based on disease, dangerousness, and treatment – and, most importantly, protecting the individual from himself – have to be undermined.  Like the abolition of chattel slavery, the abolition of psychiatric slavery must be a collective effort.  For now, psychiatric slavery is indispensable for the functioning of American society…” (p. 28)
• “It is only because psychiatry is allied with the state that deviance fro psychiatric norms is defined as disease and psychiatrists have the power to coerce mental patients.  If psychiatry and the state were separated, deviance from psychiatric norms would cease to be considered diseases and psychiatrists would lose their power to coerce persons who disagree with them.” (p. 30)
• “Psychiatry’s original sin is its refusal to acknowledge that the relationship between the psychiatrist between the psychiatrist and the involuntary mental patient is adversarial.  In other words, the psychiatrist is a double agent, pretending to serve – impartially and ‘scientifically’ – the interests of both parties to a conflict: the mental patient and his psychiatric opponents, such as family members, employers, and courts.  This is the source of virtually all of the problems that beset mental health legislation and mental health policy.  It is also why the history of psychiatry is synonymous with the history of so-called psychiatric reform, each revision further disordering the system, stimulating calls for new reforms.” (p. 31)
• “Overtly and nominally, psychiatrists are physicians, medical specialists; their medical identity is well recognized and not disputed.  Covertly and actually, they are judges and jailers; their identity as agents of the judicial and penal systems is not well recognized and if often disputed and even denied.  However, it does not require a semantic autopsy on the word ‘dangerous’ to recognize that by so qualifying a person, we stigmatize and cast him out of society.  We regularly use the adjective ‘dangerous’ in lieu of the injunction ‘avoid!’ – as in calling certain drugs or high tension wires ‘dangerous.'” (p. 32)
• “The essence of psychiatric slavery is involuntary uselessness, a passivity forcibly imposed by psychiatric master on psychiatric slave.  Cui bono?  In a society based on black slavery and trade among free persons, the slave was useful as a degraded producer: his involuntary labor and inferior status provided material comfort, leisure, and social superiority for the slave owner, his family, and white society.  In a society based on psychiatric slavery and trade among non-patients, the psychiatric slave is useful as a degraded dependent: his involuntary role as dangerous mental patient and his inferior status provide employment, existential security, and social superiority for the psychiatrist, his profession, and the mentally healthy members of society.” (p. 33)
• “How do psychiatrists acquire psychiatric slaves?  The oldest method of psychiatric slave-catching consists of creating a special class of persons, originally called ‘the mad’ or ‘inane,’ now called ‘the mentally ill’ or ‘mentally ill and dangerous’; a special class of doctors, originally called ‘mad-doctors’ and ‘alienists,’ now called ‘psychiatrists’; a special class of quasi-prisons, originally called ‘mad-houses’ or ‘insane asylums,’ now called ‘mental hospitals’; and a special class of laws, called ‘mental health laws,’ that authorize psychiatrists to forcibly confine mental patients in mental hospitals.  This method of catching slaves has been used for three hundred years and is still the basic tool of the slave catcher.” (p. 49-50)
• “Like slaves, patients incarcerated in mental hospitals also have a tendency to run away.   Revealingly, the media refers to such patients as ‘escapees’ and the law treats them not as if they were medical patients who left the hospital without medical permission, but as if they were fugitive slaves.” (p. 51)
• “This discussion of fugitive slaves and fugitive mental patients would be incomplete without mentioning the early medicalization of the slave’s craving for freedom, that is, the discovery, in 1851, of two ‘diseases peculiar to negroes’ – drapetomania and dysaesthesia Aethiopis.  Drapetomania was defined as ‘the disease causing slaves to run away,’ while dysaesthesia Aethiopis was said to be a ‘hebetude of mind peculiar to negroes.'” (p. 53)
• “This is not all.  Anticipating psychiatric abuses by a century, abolitionism itself was sometimes dismissed as madness, and the most famous American abolitionist had to reject the imposition of an insanity defense.  John Brown’s ‘attorneys tried to prevent his being sentenced to the gallows by entering a plea of insanity but Brown was incensed at the idea, and announced he was as sane as they were.’  Frederick Douglass aptly offered this eulogy for Brown: ‘Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun.  I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.'” (p. 53)
• “These early attempts to demean the Negro slave’s and the white abolitionist’s passion for liberty as symptoms of mental illness foreshadowed the frightening similarities between the dying system of chattel slavery and the developing system of psychiatric slavery.” (p. 53)
• “Modern psychiatry rests on the false premise that mental illnesses are brain diseases treatable with drugs.  Political correctness requires that we accept this premise and the practices it entails as the products of modern neuroscience and the procedures of humane social control.  As science, this is bunk, because it confuses personal conduct with biological condition.  As social control, it is despotism, subjecting innocent individuals to incarceration.” (p. 57)
• “The doctor’s business used to be to diagnose and treat disease, with the consent of the patient.  Now, politicians define disease, and doctors control bad behavior.” p. 58)
• “Chattel slavery rested on the denial that the Negro was a person.  Psychiatric slavery rests on the denial that the person with a psychiatric diagnosis is a person with the ability and right to make decisions about his own life.  To this, the doctrine of psychiatric slavery adds the lie that psychiatric imprisonment is hospitalization.  The result is that psychiatrists systematically misdefine public psychiatry and misdescribe its true aim.” (p. 60)
• “In the case of mental health laws, the opposite principle prevails: forcing drugs down a patient’s throat, or injecting them into his buttocks, is exalted as a sacred therapeutic duty.” (p. 63)
• “Psychiatry’s clarion call for treatment with ‘medications’ has been generally well received by the American public.  Many people like to take drugs and like to be dominated by authorities they regard as benevolent.” (p. 64)
• “Modern medical wars on disease and drugs bear an uncomfortable resemblance to medieval religious wars on heretics and witches.” (p. 65)
• “Today, the family’s betrayal of the person they denominate as mentally ill is perceived as a self-sacrificial act, performed solely for the purpose of providing needed treatment for a ‘loved one.'” (p. 70)
• “The free society, as this idea is understood among political philosophers, rests on the principles that the citizen is a responsible adult possessing individual rights and owing duties to the community.  In contrast, psychiatry, as a system of social practices, rests on the principle that the citizen is a potential mental patient who is, or might at any moment be, like an infant, requiring care and control.  Thus, the rule of law and the rule of psychiatric care are mutually incompatible.  The more we have of the one, the less we can have of the other.” (p. 75)
• “Prior to deinstitutionalization, psychiatrists claimed that the best treatment for seriously ill mental patients was long-term hospitalization, combined with insulin shock or electroshock.  Since deinstitutionalization, they claim that the best treatment for them is short-term hospitalization, combined with antipsychotic medication and community placement.  Both claims are pseudoscientific fables, concealing heartless bureaucratic-psychiatric policies of stigmatizing, disabling, segregating, and storing unwanted persons.” (p. 77)
• “Actually, after treatment with neuroleptic drugs and deinstitutionalization, most mental patients are worse off than they were before: the problems in living that led to their categorization as mentally ill are not remedied; in many cases their troubles are compounded by tardive dyskinesia, a disfiguring neurological disease caused by neuroleptic drugs; and most patients continue to depent on family or society for food and shelter.” (p. 77)
• “The true motive for the use of psychiatric force is not protection from dangerousness, but the desire to get rid of unwanted persons, especially family members.” (p. 78)
• “It is intrinsic to the nature of the master-slave relationship that the slave poses a permanent threat to his oppressor.  In the antebellum South, it was received wisdom that ‘The negro, as a general rule, is mendacious.’  In the United States today, it is received wisdom that the mental patient is dangerous.” (p. 85)
• “For the slave owner, the idea of the black slave’s (or colonized person’s) self-determination was anathema – an insult to his obligation as a white man (‘the white man’s burden’).  For the psychiatrist, the idea of the mental patient’s self-determination is anathema – an insult to his obligation as a healer (‘the psychiatrist’s burden’).  That is why psychiatric advance directives force mental patients to sit at the back of the bus driven by medical ethicists enlightened by the new psychiatry.” (p. 89)
• “The ultimate psychiatric objection against the PW lies in the belief that the person classified as a mental patient is dangerous not because of who he is, but because of the illness from which he suffers; and that, if he were freed from his illness, he would no longer be dangerous.  This Jekyll-and-Hyde theory of chemicals in the brain turning ‘normal’ people into maddened killers and self-killers is pure fantasy.” (p. 101)
• “The claim that untreated mental diseases cause such behaviors helps psychiatrists to impersonate real doctors (by prescribing psychiatric drugs) and puts billions into the coffers of pharmaceutical companies.” (p. 102)
• “Psychiatric power enjoys more political, medical, journalistic, and popular support than ever, and the psychiatrist’s meddling is more pervasive than ever.  Americans have more to fear from psychiatry today than in the past, in no small part because mental health professionals and their allies are engaged in a campaign fo systematically misinforming Americans about the legal, medical, and social risks inherent in becoming a psychiatric patient.” (p. 116)
• “The hands of the psychiatrist, unlike the hands of the regular physician, are soaked in the blood of coercion.  Hence, he cannot acknowledge that his doctrines and doing are insults to his victims, who experience the very existence of their oppressors as an act of delegitimization and existential violence against them.  If the psychiatrist would acknowledge this, he could no longer sleep soundly at night.” (p. 119-120)
• “The psychiatrist’s hypocrisy, like the hypocrisy of the slave owner before him, is plan to all who use their eyes for seeing and their minds for thinking.” (p. 120)
• “I hold psychiatrists responsible for their crimes against humanity, their willful ignorance fueled by their bad faith.” (p. 120)
• “Like insulin shock, metrazol shock, electric shock, and lobotomy, antipsychotic drugs are psychiatric inventions devised and used to subdue and pacify troublesome individuals.  Most patients do not like to be subjected to these interventions.  That is why, for the most part, such ‘treatments’ have been and continue to be imposed by force.  These ‘therapies’ benefit psychiatrists, the drug and device manufacturers, the patient’s relatives, and society – not the patients.” (p. 122)
• “The cure wrought by drugs-and-deinstitutionalization, like the cures produced by previous psychiatric ‘miracles,’ proved to be worse than the disease.” (p. 122)
• “In the antebellum South, there were two kinds of chattel slaves: plantation slaves in the field, and domestic slaves in the home.  In postbellum America, there are two kinds of psychiatric slaves: inpatient psychiatric slaves in mental hospitals, and outpatient psychiatric slaves in the community.” (p. 123)
• “If a medical intervention is imposed on a competent individual against his will, it is assault, not treatment.  If behavior is not an illness, then the use of force to change it ought to be called ‘assault,’ not ‘treatment.’ (p. 126)
• “For nearly half a century, from all over the world, I have been receiving a steady stream of letters from individuals who feel they have been the victims of psychiatric coercion.” (p. 129)
• “The core element of psychiatric slavery, the coercive control of the mental patient by the psychiatrist, has not changed since the seventeenth century.  What has changed and changes continuously, is the psychiatrist’s method of coercion, the scope of his powers, and the legal and social justifications for his use of force.” (p. 129)
• “The more money the government pumps into the psychiatric system, the worse the system becomes, for patient and physician alike.” (p. 134)
• “In this chapter I show how the rebirth of an undivided psychiatry, facilitated by a reductionist neuroscience and a corrupt psychopharmacology, was promoted and justified by a new philosophy of jurisprudence, aptly named ‘therapeutic.'” (p. 148)
• “Rationalized as brain science and validated as pharmacological treatment, psychiatric slavery rules undisputed.” (p. 151)
• “Restraint by chemical means does not make [others] feel guilty; herein lies the danger to the patient.” (p. 151)
• “In 1971, George Alexander, professor of law at Santa Clara University, Erving Goffman, and I founded the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization (AAAIMH).  Our aim was to give voice to psychiatric abolitionists from all walks of life and assist psychiatric slaves to regain their freedom.  Nine year later, realizing that our small group, lacking access to funds and the media, was not up to this task, we abandoned the effort.  Professional and popular opinion were running in the opposite direction.  The forces of therapeutic jurisprudence had won the hearts and minds of America’s leading opinion-makers and of the American people.” (p. 152-153)
• “Neither Krafft-Ebbing nor Freud invented the idea that ordinary behaviors, condemned by some religions as sins, are, ‘in fact,’ mental diseases.  No particular person invented it.  The idea is an integral part of the phenomenon we call the Enlightenment, characterized by a shift from a religious to a scientific-pseudoscientific outlook on life.  Since science is not doctrinal, there is, and can be, no absolute authority to answer questions such as, ‘Who speaks for science?’ or ‘Who is authorized to distinguish science from pseudoscience?’  Science and pseudoscience flourish together; and, because an attack on one is an attack on the other, perish together.” (p. 155-156)
• “The glorification of chattel slavery on the eve of the Civil War was no doubt useful for blinding the slaveholders to the brutalities of slavery.  But it inflamed the abolitionists.  The glorification of psychiatric slavery today has had a similar effect on me.  I end this chapter with a brief review of the theory and practice of psychiatric brutalities, as described by their proud practitioners.” (p. 159)
• “I close with words I borrow from the immortal pen of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).  ‘I have protracted my work,’ he wrote in the preface to his Dictionary, ’till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.'” (p. 167)

Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry

Sigmund Freud was a fraud.  He was a charlatan of the highest order.  Yet his pernicious ideas have not only survived, but thrived.  In his book Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, Thomas Szasz reveals the truth about Freud through a careful study of one of Freud’s earliest and most insightful critics, Karl Kraus.  A modern critic of psychiatry recently attempted to defend Freud and psychoanalysis by claiming that Freud was “The First Anti-Psychiatrist.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, the exact opposite is true.  The honor that is due to the first anti-psychiatrist more rightly belongs to Freud’s contemporary, and one of his fiercest critics, Karl Kraus.

Szasz appreciates Kraus not only for his bold opposition to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but also because Kraus was a proponent of individual liberty and responsibility.  Unlike Freud, he was, in Szasz’s estimation, a man of integrity.  He was a noble rhetorician, that is, a master artist and poet who worked in the medium of language to persuade his audience toward that which is good, and away from that which is evil.

With characteristic aplomb, Szasz explains why Freud has become so popular and why Kraus has mostly been forgotten.  Szasz’s description of this phenomenon also applies to Szasz himself.  Szasz’s reputation has often been tarnished by calumny or neglect:

“Although Karl Kraus was one of the first, most perceptive, and, in his day, most famous critics of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the name of this twentieth-century Viennese literary-intellectual giant had, until recent years, been virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.  My book on Kraus, first published in 1976, was intended to remedy this situation and accord this remarkable person his rightful place in the history of Misbehavioral Science, a place whose memory psychoanalysts have been eager to erase.  Indeed, Kraus’s critique of the then freshly burgeoning mental health professions was so undeniably right that psychiatric and psychoanalytic loyalists have chosen, during the better part of this century, either to ignore his views altogether or to dismiss them with a few cursory remarks.” (p. xi)

Szasz’s thorough study of Kraus, as well as his careful translations of his work, is indispensable for understanding Freud’s fraudulence, and the corresponding myths of mental illness and psychotherapy.  Like Kraus, Szasz exposes the truth about psychiatry with precision, accuracy, and good humor.  The evidence that he compiles to debunk the myths inherent in coercive psychiatry is copious and clear, and Freud is unquestionably one of the major figures at the rotten core of psychiatry:

“Ironically, Freud – the celebrated freethinker and mental liberator – was one of the most successful modern practitioners of this technique [thought control].”  Nevertheless, Freud scholars (in reality, Freudian apologists) continue to try, and fail, to reconcile Freud’s publicly proclaimed psychoanalytic principles with his behavior and private utterances – the latter being so inconsistent with the former as to make Freud one of the world’s truly great hypocrites.” (p. xii)

Szasz’s scathing criticism of Freud extends to Freud’s invention, namely psychoanalysis.  Contrary to popularly accepted opinion, Freud did not discover a new scientific treatment.  He created “fake therapy,” “fake case histories,” “fables of patients without diseases,” “fake etiologies,” and in short, a pseudoscience:

“With the pseudomedical edifice of psychoanalysis thus completed, the quack cure was elevated – by a combination of promotional conceit and popular gullibility – to the status of a full-fledged medical scientific treatment.” (p. xiii)

Contemporaries and subsequent generations have promoted Freud’s views in countless different ways.  As Szasz shows, some have even gone so far as to invent fake historiographies and hagiographies of Freud in order to promote psychoanalysis. (p. xiii)  Kraus, on the other hand has largely been forgotten or ignored.  Nevertheless, Kraus was not alone in his “animosity against the Freudian cult” (p. xv).  Szasz records George Steiner observation that:

“Canetti belongs to the small constellation of first class minds and sensibilities who have in our time rejected Freud and the psychoanalytic construct as a factitious, antihistorical mythology. . . . This constellation comprises Kraus, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, as well as Canetti himself.” (p. xv)

Szasz identifies Kraus as a noble rhetorician, which for Szasz is greater than a satirist, poet, or polemicist. (p. xix)  He also explains why Kraus’s work has been unjustly neglected:

“I believe, and I shall try to support my belief with evidence, that he is so little known today because he was on the ‘wrong’ side in the great ideological battle of his time; I further believe that he remains untranslated not so much because his German is so difficult – thought it surely is – as because his writings run against the grain of our contemporary intellectual mores even more than they did against his.” (p. xx)

From Szasz’s perspective – and I believe that he is correct – Kraus’s work plays an essential role in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis:

“Let me say here only that a history of the formative years of psychoanalysis without Kraus – which is how all such histories have so far been written – is like the cultural history of Europe during the French Revolution without Edmund Burke, or the political history of America without the Antifederalist Papers, or the medical history of infectious diseases without Ignaz Semmelweis, or the contemporary history of Russia without Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn… Kraus was prescient: while others hailed the modern arts of mental healing as liberating scientific advances, he already saw them, and warned against them, as threats to human dignity.” (p. xx-xxi)

Szasz’s book Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry begins with a chapter on Kraus’s life and work.  It continues with a presentation of Kraus’s critique of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, chapters on the connections between Kraus and Freud, a chapter on Kraus’s place in cultural history, and on his position in more recent times.  It concludes with a selection of Szasz’s own translations of Kraus’s original work.

Szasz’s hope was to present Karl Kraus “as a pioneer critic of psychiatry and psychoanalysis,” to people who “still care about human dignity.”  Like Kraus, Szasz was a friend to human dignity.  Like most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who followed him, Freud was an enemy to human dignity.:

“Not everyone so disposed can or wants to take the trouble to defend his fortress against those who lay siege to it.  But everyone can, if he wants to, at least distinguish between the friends of human dignity and its enemies.” (p. xxiii)

In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, and in his native Austria, Kraus founded a new magazine called Die Fackel (The Torch).  One of Kraus’s main targets for his satire was the press, and the press retaliated by ignoring his work (which Kraus called Totschweigetaktik, the “silent treatment”).  This same tactic has been used against Thomas Szasz himself.  Although he is a prolific author who has published thirty-five books and even more scholarly papers, in most circles, Szasz has been given the silent treatment.

To remedy this problem, and in the continuing battle against coercive psychiatry, I offer a selection of quotations from Szasz’s excellent book Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry.  My hope is that the works of both Szasz and Kraus will no longer remain obscured because of Totschweigetaktik, or the “silent treatment.”

• “Kraus thus anticipated the insights – into the relationship between the control of language and of liberty, between the destruction of the human word and of the human soul, between semantics and politics – of the celebrated authors of our age who have sounded the alarm against the utopias of hell being readied for us – in particular, those of Yevgeny Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.  But more immediately relevant to our present concerns is Kraus’s sensitivity to, and warning against, not the political but the psychiatric and psychoanalytic demagogues and destroyers of our words and our world.” (p. 17-18)
• “Kraus tried to push people toward dignity and independence through love of and respect for language; Freud tried to pull them toward discipleship and conformity through love of and respect for his own legends.  In this clash between these two giants we see foreshadowed much of the confused and tumultuous history of the past half-century of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.” (p. 19-20)
• “The distinguishing characteristic of all of Kraus’s life and work was his passion for integrity.  Personal integrity – to be as good as one’s word – was for Kraus the highest virtue.” (p. 22)
• “Evidently, only Kraus saw what others were unwilling to see – that Freud was not a real physician, and that his psychoanalytic method was not a real treatment.  ‘Psychoanalysis,’ Kraus insisted, ‘is the disease of which it claims to be the cure.’ … ‘Nerve doctors who pathologize genius should have their skulls bashed in with the collected works of the genius.'” (p. 24)
• “Kraus continued to attack both psychiatry and psychoanalysis, mainly by poking fun at them.  Increasingly, Kraus saw psychoanalysis as an ideology destructive of individualism and personal responsibility, and the vigor of his condemnation increased apace.  In 1932, remarking on the ‘spiritual foundations’ of modern fanatical movements, he couples, in the same sentence, ‘the swastika’ (i.e. Nazism) and ‘the despicable business of psychoanalysis.'” (p. 30)
• “The ‘medical language’ to which Rank here refers is, of course, not only sterile but also destructive and dehumanizing.  This is why I call psychoanalysis base rhetoric, and its inventor and principal franchiser, Freud, a base rhetorician.” (p. 38)
• “The doctrines of psychoanalysis (and psychiatry) are nothing but ‘metaphorical conquests’ over earlier doctrines concerning human nature and social control, mainly of Judaism and Christianity.” (p. 47)
• “Freud’s basic aims were to annex morals to medicine, to create a cryptoreligious ideology and be its leader.  Kraus’s basic aims were to demonstrate the moral and political consequences of debauching language in the service of special interests – whether political or psychiatric, legal or journalistic – and to purify language and thus help individuals to protect themselves from the obfuscators and obfuscations of language.” (p. 52)
• “Kraus reemphasizes and raises to new heights the Socratic principle that true knowledge lies in fearless questioning and clear speaking, and that such conduct is, par excellence, a moral enterprise… Whereas Freud stands at the very opposite pole: his is not genuine questioning, in the sense of trying to open his interlocutor’s eyes and mind, but is only a preliminary step leading to his answering all questions, filling his own as well as his interlocutor’s mind with his interpretations, and silencing the inquiry.  For Kraus and Wittgenstein, the right question suffices to destroy falsehood; for Freud, falsehood generated by a repression must be replaced with truth gained through ‘psychoanalytic insight.'” (p. 63)
• “What I mean when I say that Freud was a demoralizer is that he insisted that we view a wide variety of human behaviors, and finally all human actions, not as the consequences of moral decisions, but as the symptoms of medical diseases – that, in other words, man was not a free moral agent, but a foolish medical patient.” (p. 64)
• “I cannot get myself to accept that a whole sentence can ever come from half a man.” – Karl Kraus
• “Herein lies Kraus’s genius, which, in its way, surpasses Freud’s and Wittgenstein’s.  He takes the person’s product – in this particular case, language – and pronounces judgment on it, supported by the evidence which  that very work displays.  This approach is diametrically opposed to that of the Freudian ‘pathography’ or of the modern ‘psychohistory,’ in which the critic uses information unrelated to the work of art, or even manufactured by him, in order to defame and discredit its creator.” (p. 65)
• “Friedell saw with frightening clarity that psychoanalysis had nothing to do with medicine or healing, but had everything to do with religion and morals – and with base rhetoric: ‘Psycho-analysis is in truth a sect, with all the signs and symbols of one – rites and ceremonies, oracles and mantic, settled symbolism and dogmatism, secret doctrine and popular edition, proselytes and renegades, priests who are subjected to tests, and daughter sects which damn each other in turn.  Just as the whale, though a mammal, poses as a fish, so psycho-analysis, actually a religion, poses as a science.  This religion is pagan in character: it embraces nature-worship, demonology, chthonian belief in the depths, Dionysian sex-idolization.  This connection of religion with therapy, hygiene, and the interpretation of dreams existed in the ancient world also, as for example the healing sleep for the sick in the temples of Asklepios.  And we have here a seer and singer working for the powers of darkness in most enticing tones, an Orpheus from the Underworld: it is a new world-wide revolt against the Gospel.'” (p. 71-72)
•  “It is in Eric Voeglin, then, that we next encounter a modern thinker who carries on the moral dialogue against psychoanalysis initiated by Kraus.  Voegelin classifies psychoanalysis – with Marxism, Communism, and National Socialism – as a form of gnosticism, a term he uses in juxtaposition to philosophy.  Philosophy is the love of knowledge or truth; its aim is personal salvation.  Gnosticism is the claim to having knowledge or truth; its aim is not personal salvation, but domination over others.  While true philosophy values nothing higher than questioning, gnosticism, having arrived at truth, prohibits questioning.  Voegelin illustrates this by quoting Marx as having written ‘Give up your abstraction and you will give up your question along with it. . . . Do not think, do not question me.” (p. 77)
• “Philosophy [writes Voegelin] springs form the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it.  Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. . . . By gnostic movements, we mean such movements as progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.  We are not dealing, therefore, in all of these cases with political mass movements.  Some of them would more accurately be characterized as intellectual movements – for example, positivism, neo-positivism, and the variants of psychoanalysis. . . . [However, these movements[ have had, if not the form, at least the success of political mass movements, in that their theories and jargons have shaped the thinking of millions of people in the Western world, very often without their being aware of it.” (p. 77)
• “Kraus fully recognized Freud’s ‘genius’ – just as he recognized Hitler’s – but he regarded it as a genius for evil rather than for good.” (p. 96)
• “Ours, after all, is the age of the Mass Man and of Liberalism: its hero is the lover of Mankind, who supports the freedom and dignity of all nations, religions, and professions and opposes only the freedom and dignity of individuals; and who, by conducting himself accordingly, is hated by everyone who actually knows him and is loved by Mankind.  Karl Kraus lived almost as if he had consciously tried to fashion his life into the exactly opposite mold: and he very nearly succeeded in making everyone who really knew him love him, and in making all Groups, and all their loyal defenders, hate him.  Herein, perhaps, lies his ultimate and most enduring significance.” (p. 100)
• “Before Freud, doctors cautioned that the cure may be worse than the disease; now they ought to caution that there is a cure which is a disease – namely, psychoanalysis.” – Karl Kraus (p. 103)
• “Psychoanalysis is the occupation of lewd and lascivious rationalists who attribute everything in the world, except what they themselves do, to repressed sexuality.” – Karl Kraus (p. 103)
•  “God made man out of dust.  The analyst reduces him to it.”- Karl Kraus (p. 105)
• “Psychoanalysis is a passion, not a science.  IT lacks the steady hand of the investigator.  Indeed, it is precisely this lack which characterizes the psychoanalyst: He loves and hates his subject, envies his freedom and power, and busies himself with reducing his patient’s strengths to the level of his own weaknesses.  He claims that the artist sublimates a defect because he feels defective.  Psychoanalysis is, in fact, an act of revenge through which the analyst’s inferiority is transformed into superiority.  The patient tends naturally to subordinate himself to the physician.  This is why today every idiot wants to treat every genius.  But no matter how hard the physician tries to explain genius, all he can come up with is his own lack of it.  Genius requires no explanation.  Moreover, efforts to explain genius are usually only the defenses of mediocrity against it.  Hence, there is only one justification for the existence of psychoanalysis: it is useful for unmasking psychoanalysis.” – Karl Kraus (p. 106)
• “My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.”- Karl Kraus (p. 106)
• “Psychologists: unmaskers of the insignificant, swindlers of the significant.” – Karl Kraus (p. 108)
• “There is now a medical tendency to apply the technical terms of surgery to the soul.  Like all analogies between disparate matters, this is a joke.  Perhaps it’s the best joke materialism is capable of producing.  If the doctor now wants to do a D & C (dilations and curettage) on the unconscious of a female patient, or if the doctor wants to drain the pussy passions of an affective abscess, then his efforts are based on an extremely humorous idea.  Moreover, this idea is bound to be irresistible because the interventions of the soul-doctor are performed without even the narcosis of suggestion.  This whimsical method of treatment [psychoanalysis] should not, however, diminish our appreciation of the real value of the discovery of the origin of mental illnesses: it makes its discoverer [Freud] famous.” – Karl Kraus (p. 109-110)
• “Psychopathologists now concern themselves with poets who arrive for their check-up after they are dead.  It serves the poets right.  They should have raised mankind to a level where there could have been no psychopathologists.” – Karl Kraus (p. 111)
• “Despite its deceptive terminology, psychoanalysis is not a science but a religion – the faith of a generation incapable of any other.” – Karl Kraus (p. 117)
• “Moreover, it is an integral part of mental diseases and treatments that the illness may be the treatment, and the treatment the illness; that the healthy often emerge from the analyst’s office sick, and that the patients often emerge as therapists.  This is the land where confusion between the real and the false reigns supreme.” – Karl Kraus (p. 123)
• “Psychoanalysis, we are warned, has become a menace.  Nonsense.  It was a menace from the day it was born.” – Karl Kraus (p. 123)
• “The psychiatrist unfailingly recognizes the madman by his excited behavior on being incarcerated.” – Karl Kraus (p. 127)
• “The difference between mad-doctors and other madmen is roughly the same as that between convex and concave folly.” – Karl Kraus (p. 127)
• “Enough of this humbug that has fooled mankind for so long!” – Karl Kraus (p. 131)
• “I detest psychiatry because it feeds the individual’s hunger for power, and because, like journalism, it carries within itself vast potentialities for its abuse.  I see the psychiatrist, whose capacity for well-considered action and hence his talent for corruptibility I consider slight, as essentially feeble-minded.” – Karl Kraus (p. 136)
• “Diagnosis: one of the commonest diseases.” – Karl Kraus (p. 153)
• “Medicine: ‘Your money and your life!'” – Karl Kraus (p. 153)
• “He died: the serpent of Aesculapius bit him.” – Karl Kraus (p. 153)
• “Away with the doctors and lawyers! This world belongs to the poets.” – Karl Kraus (p. 154)
• “Doctors have no imagination in describing diseases.  Perhaps that’s why their accounts of real illnesses fit imaginary illnesses so well.” – Karl Kraus (p. 156)
• “I possess the happy combination of a great talent for psychology with an even greater talent for seeing through it.” – Karl Kraus (p. 156)
• “Because I write about everyday events, my readers believe that I write for today.  I must wait until my remarks are out of date.  Then, perhaps, they will be timely.” – Karl Kraus (p. 156)
• “An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.” – Karl Kraus (p. 157)
• “A civilized person does not compare an urn with a chamber pot, much less use it as one.  This, Kraus said, was the gist of his message.  In our day, when more people than ever are devoted to the degradation and destruction of urns, and to the euphemization and exaltation of chamber pots, Kraus’s message is more painful and timely than ever.” (p. 162)