Amazon.com: The Second Sin: Thomas Stephen Szasz: Books

I love this book. This is a little book of maximums and quotes by Dr. Szasz. If you dont know Dr. Szasz, he is a psychiatrist who hates psychiatry. More correctly, but he objects to the medical model that underpins psychiatry. He believes that this error in its basic assumptions has lead to bad consequences and blind alleys. His most famous book is called The Myth of Mental Illness.

This concern with using a wrong model has lead Dr. Szasz to look at language, and in this book of maximums are his thoughts on how we use language to define and color our moral judgments. Its kind of an expansion of the old proverb, whats good for the goose is good for the gander. For instance, Dr. Szasz notes that we say policemen receive bribes, but we say politicians receive campaign contributions. Why the difference? Why do we say, tobacco is sold by merchants, but marijuana is sold by pushers. When we dont like a TV program, we wouldnt call a TV repair man. Why then, when we dont like the way a person behaves, do we call a medical psychiatrist?

The best way to get a feel for this book is just to read the preface and learn how the doctor came up with the title of this book. He says, we all know what is the first or "original" sin: eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But we have tended to forget what the second sin was: Speaking clearly. In the first sin, God wished to prohibit man from knowing the difference between good and evil, and consequently Man could not make moral judgments. The knowledge of good and evil was the providence of only God. But man went against Gods command, and by eating the fruit, became aware of something only God was meant aware of, the difference between good and evil. As a result, God punished man, and drove him out of the Garden.

The second sin occurred during the construction of the tower of Babble. At that time, all men spoke only one language, and because there was only one language, men could be clear with one another, and there was no limit to what they could accomplish; they could build a tower to the Heavens if they desired. But again, Man encroached on the providence of God: Thinking and Speaking clearly. God came down and punished Man by confusing his language and thereby confusing his thought process. That is why today, Man is enjoined to follow the law, and not worry about the details, they whys and wherefores.

But all men are sinners. If a man is to be a man, it is his nature to question Authority, to make judgments, to wonder what is really good and what is really evil. It is Mans nature to attempt to think and speak clearly. But it has always been the goal of Authority to prevent Man from doing these things for himself without obtaining permission. In early history, it was the Church that demanded that Man not question Church wisdom. Then it was the Government state that demanded Man not questions the decrees of the state. Today, it the medical psychiatrists who seek to control us by confusing out thinking. Authorities have always tended to honor and reward those who close mans mind by confusing his tongue, and have always tended to fear and punish those who open it by the plain and proper use of language.

Every age has its high priests who seek to control us by debasing out language and confusing us. And every age has the iconoclasts who cry out that the Emperor has no clothes, and we are being bamboozled. Dr. Szasz sees himself in the latter category, with men like Voltaire, Bierce and Mencken.

This book is out-of-print, but is not difficult to find. Dr. Szasz has up-dated and released this book with a new title: The Untamed Tongue: A dissenting Dictionary, and it is available through Amazon. However, in this case, more is not better. Make the effort and try and find the original

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4.0 out of 5 stars what's in a definition?, March 24, 2007

By	kaioatey (Awatovi, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Second Sin (Paperback)

This is a collection of short epigram-like quips from one of the enfants terribles of modern psychiatry. Szasz has noticed, like Laing before him and Foucault later on, that language has a terrifying power to define, isolate, constrain and control. The politics of power includes the definition of what is sane -ie, of who is allowed to participate in the society and who is to be denied this participation. This power has conferred upon the psychiatric profession a tremendous burden of responsibility, which, according to S., is often not shouldered with integrity. Prescribing Ritalin to millions of active children, criminalizing some drugs (but not others peddled by powerful and rich lobbies), institutionalizing people who in indigenous societies would be allowed to participate in the community... is often ethically suspect and philosophically questionable. To Szasz, forcing patients into treatment against their will is nothing short of mental rape. Most psychiatrists get away with peddling drugs to children simply because this is the only game in town, and they are determined to keep it this way. "When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with 'free choice'; when he dissaproves, he judges him to have acted without 'free choice'."

The language used to define sanity becomes a tool through which psychiatry both insulates itself and assumes control. Psychiatrists use, according to Szasz, 'ready-made phrases' whose function is to 'anesthetize the brain'. Defining people as ,insane', 'deperssed' etc is a semantic hammer that can destroy the subject's dignity and respectability as effectively as cracking his/her skull. This dehumanized language ceases to see a schizophrenic patient as a human being, denies him/her the ability for self-control and self-determination, defining them in a way that makes them invisible to themselves. While Szasz keeps pointing out contradictions and taken-for-granted attitudes in his field, he does not have any real answers.

I find interesting Szasz's observation that addiction (smoking, drinking, shooting heroin, etc) is "part of an internally significant dramatic production in which the 'patient-victim' is the star. So long as it is, the person will find it difficult or impossible to give up his habit; whereas once he has decided to close down this play and leave the stage, he will find the grip of the habit broken and will cure himself of 'addiction' with surprising ease."

The history of psychiatry, as recorded by psychiatrists and medical historians, proceeds according to S. from a faulty basic premise: that the institutional psychiatrist helps and heals the involuntary (i.e., non-paying) patient. As a result, the patient loses control over his relationship with the expert, and over his basic dignity as a human being. One problem is that the institutional (or hired) psychiatrist is a bureaucratic employee, paid for his services by private/public organizations (HMOs, etc) and under pressure to overprescribe drugs and underproscribe individual therapy. Like the Inquisitor a few hundreds of years ago, the psychiatrist uses violence against the 'madman' in order to restrain him/her from possible and feared violence against the social order. While in former Soviet Union psychiatry was a tool to be used for confining political opponents to mental hospitals, Szasz's work opens up a new set of questions, that is, does Western 'science' similarly criminalize people who are different simply because they cannot participate in the marketplace. As a result, the bureaucrat resorts to socio-chemical engineering.

"The 'depressive' is low on himself; the psychiatrist makes him high through drugs. The 'manic' is high on himself; the psychiatrist makes him low through drugs." (p. 75).

Szasz shows himself to be cantankerous, acidic, cynical and courageous. There are a number of instances in which I disagree with him. However, he still provides, after all these years, fresh air and thought-provoking ideas about language, power and sanity. These will not go away soon.