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To the Editor: In reading Dr Henderson’s review of the book Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics,¹ it was difficult to determine why Henderson seems surprised that Dr Szasz and his critics continue to disagree. In Thomas Kuhn’s terms,² Szasz and psychiatrists have incommensurate paradigms. The essays in this book were well-chosen and illuminated the continuing refusal of psychiatry to understand the completeness of Szasz’s rejection of what he has called "the therapeutic state."

I am most disturbed by Henderson’s suggestion that Szasz is anti-Semitic, particularly by quoting Karl Popper and not Szasz himself. And Henderson’s statement that the book lacks a human rights perspective indicates that he has apparently not read Szasz’s work where he clearly rejects, for example, a "mental patient’s bill of rights" because it claims to give the mental patient all kinds of fake freedoms but not the real freedom that matters . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Keith Hoeller, PhD
Editor, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry
RKHoeller@aol.com
Seattle, Wash