Thomas Szasz Quotes on Medicine & Medical (8 Quotes)

Masturbation the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease in the twentieth, it's a cure.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

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.

In the past, men created witches now they create mental patients.

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

We achieve ''active'' mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.