Szasz conducts 90th-birthday seminar: The Myth of Mental Illness 50 Years On. Inner Circle Seminar 153 (13 June 2010)

Thomas Szasz
Photograph by Andrew Thomas Peters
August 2008

Thomas Szasz

conducts his 90th-birthday seminar

The Myth of Mental Illness

50 Years On

Inner Circle Seminar No. 153
conducted by Thomas Szasz
introduced by Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 13 June 2010
10 a.m. – 12 noon   2 p.m. – 4 p.m.

 

Thomas Szasz celebrates his 90th birthday (15 April 2010) by conducting his third Inner Circle Seminar, 50 years after his epochmaking paper ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ (1960) and book The Myth of Mental Illness (1961). HarperCollins has just released a 50th-anniversary, expanded edition of the book, which those attending his seminar are asked to read in advance. The book has been enormously influential, but most readers do not appreciate how fundamental and radical is the change in thinking and practice it embodies and calls for. Many courses ‘teach’ this book, but few teachers understand it. It is perhaps too simple, too revolutionary. In today’s seminar Professor Szasz will explain his thesis on ‘mental illness’, and how it has been misunderstood. Then he will address your questions, perplexities, and challenges. His lecture will open out into an Inner Circle Seminar, which means, as participants know, an intense search for understanding through dialogue, in which beginners as well as international experts and scholars share their perplexities in a respectful atmosphere, even though there will be a larger attendance than at the usual seminars. Those who attended Professor Szasz’s previous Inner Circle Seminars, in 2003 and 2007, know how electrifying this dialogue can be.

 

Venue: Portman Hotel, 22 Portman Square, London W1H 7BG (http://www.radissonblu.co.uk/hotel-london/contact)

Subscription: Students £108, others £135; some bursaries; no refunds unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

 

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.