Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices

Rating:
Summary: Szasz does it again!
Review: What did Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Nathaniel Branden, and Murray Rothbard think about the "Therapeutic State"? This is an important book for anyone who values individual liberty and the rule of law. Advocates of freedom have too often overlooked the dangers to liberty posed by what Szasz has dubbed the Therapeutic State, coercive rule on the basis of health, including so-called mental health. The dangers are real, and any lover of liberty who fails to come to grips with it risks being thought, at best, slothful, and at worst, a hypocrite. I heartily recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Szasz does it again!
Review: What did Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Nathaniel Branden, and Murray Rothbard think about the "Therapeutic State"? This is an important book for anyone who values individual liberty and the rule of law. Advocates of freedom have too often overlooked the dangers to liberty posed by what Szasz has dubbed the Therapeutic State, coercive rule on the basis of health, including so-called mental health. The dangers are real, and any lover of liberty who fails to come to grips with it risks being thought, at best, slothful, and at worst, a hypocrite. I heartily recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: For Libertarians to decide.
Review: While Libertarians are a relatively small group, and an American one at that, they are influential as the hard branch of Classic Liberalism. Unfortunately, they seem possessed with a mania for free market economics only. Many of them seem happy to let alleged experts on mental health determine the permissibility of acts like taking drugs, determine one's own death, engaging in sexual or ideological pursuits, life styles, etc. But certainly to have ready access to efficient pain-killers, freely supplied in the market, is more important than to defend the "natural law" right of wealthy heirs to remote estates, to suggest an example.

Maybe people directly affected by extreme psychiatric measures against their liberty, or guilty evildoers excused by their "mental illness" are a minority. But the whole society is affected by the phony "scientism" of psychiatrists and the like, who steal from human liberty enormous provinces in the name of care and science, and threaten to encroach even more. Now Szasz calls on Libertarians to revise their conceptions and include the fight against the "therapeutic state" and "pharmacracy" in their agenda. A Libertarian himself , a brilliant intellect and a daring and outspoken personality, he has made it clear that mental illness is a myth, most of the time a legal fiction, conceived in fact to achieve legal aims against the basic assumptions of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, bypassing them on "scientific grounds". As it happens, Sszasz's criticism of psychiatry is quite correct. He is right, and the fact that what he contends is quite right is very important and has huge implications.

This book is an intellectual treat, as the author has let us to expect from him. The most prominent Libertarian -and not so Libertarian- thinkers and activists are assessed: Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard, Rand. Also figures of the past like Bertrand Russell or Stuart Mill. Or persons like Nathaniel Branden. One feels that he hits the target with each one of them, not shirking from scathing rebuke when necessary. He confesses a reluctance to expose Mises's psychiatric incursions. Certainly, it is sad that Mises used the argument of "neuroticism" on his opponent's part, as I read with regret in "Liberalism" some time ago. Hayek himself has no excuse since he was approached by Szasz -we read in www.szasz.com- but didn't show interest in the matter, sticking to old clichés.

In this book Szasz stops just on the verge of "character assassination", since he doesn't confine himself to discuss the ideas of these persons, but comments on their lives also. This is no shortcoming with me, on the contrary. I heard it said that the author is "authentic" in the sense that he believes what he says and writes and lives by these standards. The story of a person who decided to be a "transexual" -a man who made himself into an appearence of a woman- is included with his or her tale of psychiatric woe. The author reproduces here some brilliant lines he wrote elsewhere on the matter, reminding that while a man is a man even when he changes the appearance of his genitalia as he does with his clothes, he has the right to do it as a self-owner. Very perceptively he shows these kind of decisions as a default on social roles.

Also discussed at the beginning are the Libertarian principles of self-ownership and non-aggression. There is also a well-advised parallel between Psychiatry and Economics as "human disciplines" which try to pass as sciences proper. Let's hope that Libertarians take notice and widen their scope of interests, because although some of them showed at times an understanding of these matters -Rothbard or Childs-, I don't see that they are very concerned now, preferring to walk once and again on their usual haunts of free-market economics and propriety rights. Or ranting foolishly in favor of the social function of blackmailers. Remember that one's person is the first and more radical "property" one possesses. And a word of caution included in the book: therapists who don't abide by their obligations of secrecy and service to their clients are knaves, and "patients" who put into their hands personal and intimate affairs and confidence are fools. That's the word. Beware.