hi! don’t know if you’ve ever talked about szász on here, but if you haven’t, do you have any thoughts on his writing? thank you!
Was Szász Valid, the shortest thread in the history of forums, locked by caden transmutationisms promptly after giving the answer: Resoundingly No.
uh no but seriously, szász is a great example of how arguments can sometimes appear similar to one another when in fact they are not similar at all because of the underlying philosophical and political assumptions that are causing the same words to be deployed in radically different ways, lol. so for example, szász talks about psychiatrised patients being deprived of "liberty" by the psychiatric apparatus. but what does he mean by liberty? well, it's an explicitly right-libertarian conception of freedom-from, which locates coercion and force as characteristics of a tyrannical state but offers no material analysis of how such a state comes to exist or what class interests it protects.
or, consider how he frames his critique of the concept of 'mental illness'. unlike, for example, rd laing, szász was never interested in defending psychiatrised patients' experiences or radical politics as serious challenges to the established social order. szász was a moralist who saw a great many patients as 'malingering' and whose critique of psychiatry and the concept of mental illnesses explicitly aimed to reify the epistemological and social authority of the rest of the medical profession, which he saw as scientifically and biologically grounded in a way that discourses on the 'mind' could never be.
szász's politics were not liberatory and his critique of psychiatry was not either; his work with the cchr confirms this to be true, but his right-wing views were baked into his commentary before that. that he identified some examples of social / medical coercion isn't really of intellectual value to me because 1) his explanations of how medico-statistical norms came to be accepted and enforced are based on weak and spotty historical reasoning, and 2) other people have also pointed these things out and have interpreted them in more fruitful ways, such as anti-capitalist materialist analysis, historical arguments about the state's and the medical profession's reification and political use of racism and racial categories, and so forth.
