Thomas Szasz. "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" 60 years on. Keith Hoeller & Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 301 (14 December 2025)

 

Thomas Szasz

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1965)

60 years on

Keith Hoeller   Anthony Stadlen

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 301

Sunday 1 December 2025

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Thomas Szasz
Szasz’s 90th-birthday seminar
Inner Circle Seminar No. 153
London, 13 June 2010

Photograph copyright jennyphotos.com
Not to be used without permission

In 1965 Thomas Szasz published two of his most original and refreshing books: Psychiatric Justice and The Ethics of  Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy. We shall explore both towards the end of this 60th-anniversary year. Today we look at the second of them.

In what is advertised as his ‘authoritative’ book, The Legacy of R. D. Laing, M. Guy Thompson writes (p. 26): 

‘Szasz insisted that the whole structure of psychiatry, including its psychological derivative, psychotherapy, should be abolished.’ 

This is a radical misunderstanding. Authentic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is not a derivative of psychiatry. And in Inner Circle Seminar No. 117, Thomas Szasz: Addressing Your Questions, on 16 September 2007, Szasz answered the very first question from the audience as follows:

‘I think psychotherapy is one of the most worthwhile things in the world.’

(This was tape-recorded.)

Of course, on many occasions Szasz denounced so-called ‘psychotherapy’ when  ‘psyche’ was  misconceived as a reification, ‘therapy’ perverted as a medicalisation. But he made his living, primarily neither from his bestselling books nor from his prestigious professorship, but from his practice of what he regarded as authentic ‘psychotherapy’ or ‘psychoanalysis’, which, in 2007, he affirmed as ‘one of the most worthwhile things in the world’. 

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis was one of Szasz’s own favourites among his books. It could equally have been described as a fundamental contribution to thinking on ‘existential therapy’. (Though Szasz severely criticises Medard Boss’s case study of ‘Dr Cobling’ in Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis as a paradigm of existential therapy, because it suggests that ‘ithe therapist must have a limitless dedication to his patient’s welfare’. ‘This posture,’ says Szasz, ‘is a sham.’)

It is typical of Szasz that, having in 1965 given his book The Ethics of  Psychoanalysis the subtitle The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy, he writes in his preface to the 1988 (Syracuse) edition: ‘...there is – there can be – no such thing as a…psychotherapeutic method’! But in no sense was he repudiating his book.

Szasz wanted to abolish compulsory psychiatry. He did not want to abolish psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. But for him it was crucial that psychotherapy should be voluntary and contractual. He disapproved of child psychotherapy because, he said, it could not be contractual and so should be abolished. No matter how silly adult psychotherapy might be, as long as it was voluntary it was none of his business to try to stop it.

Szasz also endorsed the following statement:

The pioneering existential analysts were all psychoanalysts. For example, the Daseinsanalysts Medard Boss and Alice Holzhey-Kunz wrote that Daseinsanalysis ‘wants only to be a purified psychoanalysis’ – purified, that is, of the scientistic ‘metapsychology’ in which Freud framed his findings. True, Freud took, or affected to take, as a compliment Binswanger’s criticism that Freud saw man as homo natura, an object for natural science; but there is more to Freud than this. Today’s seminar will again reveal how, despite his scientistic and psychiatric aspirations, Freud – at his best – was an existential pioneer. We aim, as in previous Inner Circle Seminars on Freud from 1996 on, to renew the existential and phenomenological heart of his quest, as did Szasz. Your contribution will be welcome.