Thomas Szasz: The meaning of mind (Praeger, 1996)

Big mentor is wrong!

Tom Szasz has been my mentor for a long time.  He, and only he, showed me the big picture as to what involuntary psychiatry, and so-called free societies, really are.

His analysis of the psychiatric Newspeak; his concept of the Therapeutic State; his stance against both psychiatric bio-reductionism and psychoanalysis, and especially his moral caliber and love for liberty have had tremendous impact on my thought and worldview.  Anyone willing to know a true dissident of our system should read Szasz's classics.  Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America is a good starting point.

Alas, my dear mentor went astray in some passages of The Meaning of Mind.  He just doesn't understand what is going on inside the heads of people who have been through psychotic crises.  Szasz makes the same error that psychiatrists do when interpreting disturbed minds: "Don't listen to them!"

There is only one way to understand people in psycho crisis: to read what they have written about their experiences.  John Modrow's How to Become a Schizophrenic is a window into the mind of the author and the parental abuse dynamics that made him temporarily mad.  Since Modrow sent the manuscript to Szasz, and since he read it, there is no excuse for those passages in The Meaning of Mind where Szasz blames the victims for their hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, hearing voices and obsessions.  Szasz does not even mention Modrow's seminal work, which was published since 1992; and he blames poor Virginia Woolf for the voices she heard.

Szasz is not concerned about what it feels, from the insider's subjective self, to have a panic attack and to lose one's mind.  He tries to approach the subject of the process of going mad objectively, as if it were a normal, everyday experience that can be understood with plain common sense.  But Szasz has never had a psychotic breakdown.  Modrow has.  Modrow has the key to understand the mad world.  Szasz doesn't.

Anyone who really wants to know something about the subject is advised to read not only Modrow's autobiographical account, but Silvano Arieti's classic Interpretation of Schizophrenia, or, more recently, Schizophrenia by Colin Ross.  The "model of trauma" of mental disorders is the only rational alternative to the psychiatrist's medical model, but very few have heard of it.

Parental abuse is the cause of most mental disorders even in the grown up neurotic adult (see Susan Forward's bestseller Toxic Parents).  Szasz makes the incredible statement that "child abuse, sex abuse, ignorance, poverty, racism" is no causative factor (page 37).  Even worse, Szasz states that "autism is a poorly understood, perhaps genetically caused, condition" (page 56).  This is an incredible statement from the one who has been biopsychiatry's main foe.  Actually, autism is a purely psychogenic condition caused by non-loving mothers who treat their babies as objects (see Peter Breggin's Toxic Psychiatry, pages 287ff). 

Here there is another Szasz statement that I find it incredible: "If, on balance, the voices would perturb him [the so-called schizophrenic] more than they please him, he would stop producing them" (pages 130f).

This is a rather silly remark.  Though I have never had a schizo crisis, I personally know what an obsessive thought is (falling in love!), and I know that I never had the slightest chance to kick the damn thought out of my head.  Szasz continues: "However, hallucinating persons refuse to take antipsychotic drugs voluntarily, preferring the company of their voices."

Oops!  Has the great Tom Szasz written this statement, or is it a slogan of that Orwellian association, NAMI?

"As I already suggested, the schizophrenic patient who hallucinates or has delusions is profoundly dishonest with himself" (page 130).

It is unnecessary to continue quoting these silly blame-the-victim pronunciations.  It is enough to say that Szasz is absolutely ignorant of what mental hell is.  I insist that since the process of going mad is a thoroughly subjective experience both Szasz and his foe, the orthodox psychiatrist, have no right to interpret what is going on inside the minds of these people.  Let the true insiders talk, for Goodness sake! Let us give them a chance to speak out their horrible tragedies that made them mad!

I would like to finish this review with words not from Szasz's book, but a quotation in Modrow's, whose abusive parents were internalized in the poor boy he was: "After each assault by these internal persecutors, the individual's ego retreats more and more behind a fortress that becomes increasingly empty, until at last, in words of Peter Rosenbaum, the moat is empty; the bridge is down; the sentinels fail to stand guard. The unconscious storms into consciousness, and the walking dreamer of Jung is to be seen."

Peter Breggin: Toxic psychiatry: why therapy, empathy and love must replace the drugs, electroshock, and biochemical theories of the new psychiatry 

 

Dear Dr. Breggin:

I am a writer who writes about child abuse and psychiatry in Spanish.

I would really like to thank you for your work.  When I was a teenager my mother ruined my young life by secretely pouring neuroleptics in my meals without my knowing it.  But thanks to your work I know now that the hellish "akathisia" I experienced for months was the direct result of the terrible drug.  I am sincerely thankful for your enlightening me on this matter.

I wrote you two or three letters in 2003 and 2004.  None of them was answered but I hope you will answer this one.

Your EHPP editor Laurence Simon contradicts what you say in Chapter 2 of Toxic Psychiatry.  For instance, regarding an article submission for EHPP Simon suggested me to put aside any "theories that blame poor mother" for psychological damage in the child.  He was very emphatic on this.

Two years ago I sent Simon my revised version.  I eliminated all mention to Lidz, Laing and Arieti's work.  But Simon demanded as requisite for publication that I had to eliminate all reference to the model of trauma of mental disorders, about which he is completely skeptical.  Curiously, my article does not deal with trauma: it is an attack on biological psychiatry, though I did mention the trauma model.

Let me quote from your schizophrenia chapter in Toxic Psychiatry: "More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationships to current entrapments" (page 24).  "Mad persons are victims of a corrupt upbringing: Behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invented in order to live in an unlivable situation.  What's wrong is not 'in the patient', but in his family and society" (page 31).

You made many other similar pronouncements in your chapter about schizophrenia under the headings "The Family" (pages 34ff), "Envy and Shaming in the Family" (pages 36ff), "Blaming" (pages 39f) and "Should Parents Feel Guilty?" (page 40).  Indeed, those views are identical to mine.  This is why I am totally flabbergasted that your journal editor holds the opposite view: that the basic etiology of psychoses is still a total mystery.

Even though I write in Spanish, I am about to finish a book that includes harsh criticism of Laurence Simon and EHPP.  The reason for this is that your editor's stand ("poor mother") is an absolute insult for people who have had terribly abusive mothers —and fathers too!

I want to spare you from that sort of criticism.  Those passages of yours quoted above show me that you are —or at least you were when writing Toxic Psychiatry— a very compassionate and understanding person toward survivors, and that you believed there is some truth in the claim that some parents drive their offspring mad.

So please answer this letter.  Why an editor you chose holds exactly the opposite view of what you say in your manifesto?  If the subject of parental abuse is paramount to understand mental stress and disorders, as you wrote, why haven't you fired Laurence Simon?

Respectfully,

Cesar Tort. 

Peter Breggin did not respond to any of my various letters and reminders, which I sent him through the span of two years.  His silence, which greatly offended me, as well as the total lack of empathy toward mental victims shown by his editor are no mystery. 

The first commandment of our rather Neanderthal culture is "Thou Shalt Spare Parents."  Once this unwritten law is recognized and understood it is easy to understand Szasz's silliness, Breggin's intellectual cowardice, his emotionally blind editor and a culture that destroys minds since childhood.  Just take a look at Alice Miller's revolutionary approach to psychology.  All of her work focuses on abusive parents: precisely what Simon et al fear the most.  Miller's Breaking down the wall of silence is a good introduction of a cultural revolution.  I quote from the dust jacket: "Dr. Miller convincingly demonstrates how psychoanalysts from Freud onward, as well as teachers, clergy, politicians, and members of the media, have shrunk from recognizing the enormous extent and devastating effects of child abuse."

I am afraid to say that, like his shrink colleagues, since Breggin wrote the second chapter of Toxic Psychiatry he has miserably shrunk from recognizing the psychotic effects of child abuse.

E-mail exchange between David Oaks, director of the psychiatric survivors group Mind Freedom and Cesar Tort

Dear David:

We are on the same front combating psychiatry: you in the States and I in Mexico.  So do not misunderstand me!  One thing that bothers me of your web page, as well as Szasz's and Breggin's, is that none of you talk about what causes neuroses and even psychoses: parental abuse. Curiously, the antipsychiatrists of the 1960s had more guts than today's critics: all of them blamed parents. Please take a look at my critical reviews of some of Szasz and Breggin's books in the English section of my web page.

Respectfully,

Cesar Tort.

 

David Oaks responds, and my reply (slightly revised):

A lot of groups work on the issue of trauma and how trauma leads to mental and emotional problems. A lot of groups have material on that, and our Mad Market of books has information about that too. However, as a human rights group, we are focusing on human rights issues.

Best wishes,

David.  

12 December 2005

Dear David:

Yes: I remember that issue of Mind Freedom magazine with a big picture of Peter Breggin on the cover.  The issue lists lots of books, some dealing with trauma as the causative factor.  However, even that issue's abstract of John Modrow's book doesn't mention a single word about schizophrenogenic parents!  If I am wrong about your organization, please indicate me a single page within your large web site that specifically deals with the subject that some parents drive their children mad.

Respectfully,

Cesar Tort.

Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not a single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood.

Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident.  It does so by necessity.  It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals...  Fear of the truth about child abuse is a leitmotif of nearly all forms of therapy known to me.

The danger does not lie with individuals, however criminal they may be.  Far more, it lies in the ignorance of our entire society, which confirms these people in the lies that they were obliged to believe in childhood.  Teachers, attorneys, doctors, social workers, priests, and other respected representatives of society protect parents from the mistreated child's every accusation and see to it that the truth about child abuse remains concealed.  Even the child protection agencies insist that this crime, and this crime alone, should go unpunished.

It is the resentment of the past, we are told, that is making us ill.  In those by now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed.  Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well.  Even if both your parents were alcoholic, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, bet, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive.

In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents' destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past.

By refusing to forgive, I give up all illusions.  Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to?  I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me.  So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis?  What's the use?  Whom does it help?  It doesn't help my parents to see the truth.  But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth.  But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely.

I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incompressible cruelties.  This ideology is indivisible with the command "Thou shalt not be aware" [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.

The possibility of change depends on whether there is a sufficient number of enlightened witnesses to create a safety net for the growing consciousness of those who have been mistreated as children, so that they do not fall into the darkness of forgetfulness, from which they will later emerge as criminals or the mentally ill.

But who is there to help when all the "helpers" fear their own personal history?  Bogus traditional morality, destructive religious interpretations, and confusion in our methods of childrearing all make this experience harder and hinder our initiative.  Without a doubt, the pharmaceutical industry also profits from our blindness and despondency.

If one day the secret of childhood were to become no longer a secret, the state would be able to save immense sums that it spends on hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and prisons maintaining our blindness.  That this might deliberately happen is almost too incredible a thought.

 

 

Recommended readings

 

1)  Alice Miller:  Breaking down the wall of silence: the liberating experience of facing painful truth (Dutton Books, 1991)