Szasz: Liberation by Oppression. Inner Circle Seminar 62 (27 October 2002)

Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz

Liberation by Oppression:
A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry (2002)

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 62
Sunday 27 October 2002
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Szasz’s first paper was published in 1947. Fifty-five years (more than seven hundred publications) later, his style is clearer and more incisive than ever. Today, we examine his latest book, published in 2002. It is sometimes claimed that Szasz repeats himself. In Kierkegaard’s sense, of repetition as ‘purity of heart’, an authentic commitment to ‘one thing’, this is true. As Heidegger says, each great thinker ‘thinks one thought’. Szasz’s ‘one thought’ is human freedom, responsibility, dignity and decency; with its corollary: the immorality of the compulsory compulsive repetition, the destructive ‘death instinct’, of clinical psychiatry. His thinking is always fresh, creative and new.

Venue: Room F, Acland Building, Regent’s College, London NW1 4NS
Cost: Students £59, others £76, by 20 October (some bursaries)
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, 64 Dartmouth Park Road, London NW5 1SN
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7485 3896 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com