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The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.
Thomas Szasz
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Thomas Szasz
Age: 92 †
Born: 1920
Born: April 15
Died: 2012
Died: September 8
Academic
Human Rights Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Buda Pest
Religion
Overlapping
Psychotherapy
Mutually
Repression
Rhetoric
Ingredients
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Basic
More quotes by Thomas Szasz
When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.
Thomas Szasz
'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.
Thomas Szasz
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.
Thomas Szasz
Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
Thomas Szasz
The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.
Thomas Szasz
In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines buggery as heresy, sodomy.
Thomas Szasz
Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.
Thomas Szasz
He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
Thomas Szasz
The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.
Thomas Szasz
The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic - in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea - known to medical science is work.
Thomas Szasz
Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.
Thomas Szasz
There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
Thomas Szasz
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz
The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, Jewish problem was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews drug-abuse problem is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.
Thomas Szasz
Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.
Thomas Szasz
If you talk to God, you are praying If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.
Thomas Szasz
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.
Thomas Szasz
The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.
Thomas Szasz
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
Thomas Szasz