Freud’s First Case Study. Who was its ‘Heroine’? Fact or Fiction? Richard Skues conducts Inner Circle Seminar 237 (9 July 2017)

Sigmund Freud, 1891

Freud’s First Case Study (1892)

Who was its ‘heroine’?

Was Freud truthful?
Are his claims substantiated?

Richard Skues

conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 237

introduced by

Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 9 July 2017

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In this seminar the brilliant historian Richard Skues will reveal, and help us discover for ourselves, his paradigm-changing research findings on Freud’s first case history. This may well turn out to give evidence for Thomas Szasz’s affirmation in his 2007 Inner Circle Seminar:

Psychotherapy is one of the most worthwhile things in the world.

During twenty-one years of seminars we have criticised much in the great cases of psychotherapy; but this was the lively self-examination of a noble tradition – not a matter of ‘Killing Freud’ [one book’s title], or of promoting biological or compulsory psychiatry. We have criticised the corruption of psychotherapy by its confusion with clinical psychiatry and by the mystifying language of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’. But this is not an attack on psychotherapy itself.

We hope in this and future Inner Circle Seminars to demonstrate the great value and achievements of psychotherapy, and provide psychotherapists themselves, as well as the public, with authentic evidence for their discipline and craft, and for its often astonishing and unpredictable authentic outcome, as opposed to the alienated, institutionalised, mechanistic, box-ticking demands to justify their practice as ‘evidence-based’ and ‘outcome-focussed’.

We start (where better?) with Sigmund Freud’s first significant case history (1892): his hypnotic treatment of a woman who had difficulty breastfeeding. The philosopher and historian of psychiatry Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has claimed that the patient was none other than Freud’s wife Martha, thus entailing contradictions allegedly due to an alleged deviousness of Freud’s that would be ethically preposterous.

Why has Borch-Jacobsen’s claim not attracted more attention? Would it not be scandalous if Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, were so fraudulent?  The answer is that it has become a commonplace in recent decades to assume that Freud was indeed a liar and a fraud, so that Borch-Jacobsen can draw on this by now paradigmatic presumption to find, circularly, yet more ‘evidence’ for this presumed paradigm.

It is in this sense that the work of Richard Skues, one of the world’s most serious and respected Freud scholars, is paradigm-changing. A superb teacher, he will facilitate our researching in the seminar itself, with the help of our iPhones, tablets, etc., the questions:

(1) Who was the patient?
(2) Was Freud truthful?
(3) Can his claims of therapeutic success be substantiated?

This seminar is one of the most important of all since our seminars began 21 years ago.

Why?

Freud said that his theories were dispensable and (he used the English phrase) ‘open to revision’. To understand and evaluate psychoanalysis we should, he said, examine and ‘judge’ his small number of detailed individual case studies and analyses of specific dreams and slips. The case studies in particular he offered explicitly as true accounts, in which he strove for accuracy in all respects except the minimum disguise necessary for confidentiality. To change any other detail would be, he said, an ‘abuse’. And one should make clear what had been disguised.

For most of the twentieth century, nobody questioned Freud’s truthfulness at this basic level of reporting. His interpretations of what he reported were ridiculed by many as wild, crazy, far-fetched, absurd, the theories of a charlatan; but his honesty as a reporter of facts was unquestioned. And psychoanalysts such as Kanzer and Glenn, in their book Freud and His Patients (1980), argued that, like the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Freud’s case studies would never be replaced as paradigms from which psychoanalysts and others would learn their craft, whether by agreement or dissent.

However, since the 1970s, philosophers, journalists, and even some historians have claimed that Freud, far from being an accurate reporter, was a liar and fraud whose case studies were fiction, even on one occasion portraying a patient who never existed.

This constitutes a grave crisis for psychoanalysis, and for psychotherapy generally. If the case studies which Freud said we should take as embodying his most fundamental discoveries are discredited as fraudulent, what then?

Leading Freudian and, significantly, Jungian analysts have pleaded that all case studies are necessarily fictional; that ‘narrative truth’, not mere ‘historical truth’, is what counts; that, in fact, we are all fictions; and that, for example, Freud’s living ‘Wolf Man’ patient was an ‘impostor’, while the ‘real’ Wolf Man existed precisely in the pages of Freud’s immortal case study and nowhere else. This hardly seems a satisfactory resolution of the crisis.

But why is this also a crisis for other forms of psychotherapy, such as Jungian and existential? Are they not independent of Freudian psychoanalysis? No. For example, the pioneer existential therapists (Binswanger, Boss, Szasz, Laing, Esterson) were all psychoanalysts. They would have been horrified at the schizoid way existential analysis and psychoanalysis are taught today as if they were in mutual contradiction. Boss and Holzhey wrote: ‘Daseinsanalysis wants only to be a purified psychoanalysis’: purified, that is, of natural-scientistic ‘metapsychology’. For what they saw as the phenomenological discoveries of Freud and later psychoanalysts, they had deep respect. They saw existential therapists who were ignorant of psychoanalysis as simply incompetent. Such therapists are likely to use vulgarised psychoanalytic ideas in any case, but without realising they are doing so, and without insight into their origin. In this sense, psychoanalysis and existential analysis stand or fall together.

Was Freud a fraudulent fictionaliser, or was he a conscientious chronicler, or perhaps a bit of both? This is what Richard Skues will help us decide on Sunday 9 July.

As explained above, this is not merely an historical footnote, but is of immediate practical urgency for us as therapists. As a true teacher, Richard Skues will not lecture us on his own views of the matter. Rather, he will show that we ourselves have the means to find the answer.

You are encouraged to bring smartphones and tablets so that we may participate in active research together. If you book, you will be sent a copy of Freud’s first case study as an email attachment.

Your contribution to the dialogue will be warmly welcomed.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, mineral water, fruit, nuts, biscuits included; payable a month in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  +44 (0) 7809 433 250

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 universities.

Laing and Esterson. 8. The Heads. 50 years on. Hilary Mantel and Anthony Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 236 (18 June 2017)

Laing and Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family
50 Years On
Family 8: The Heads

Dame Hilary Mantel   Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 236
Sunday 18 June 2017
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Hilary Mantel

R. D. Laing

Aaron Esterson

Why is this nowadays rarely read or even referenced book of 1964 so important? It is, after all, absent from almost all discussions either of ‘the family’ or of ‘schizophrenia’. The extremely rare discussions of it patronise it, as if they had long passed beyond it; but without having begun to understand it, let alone catch up with it.

And yet it is so fundamental, and so simple.

R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s research, reported in this masterpiece of 1964 and continued by Esterson in his profound The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness (1970), was a concrete embodiment of the theoretical work of their most advanced and radical contemporaries of the 1960s: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Question of Method; Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness; and Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss’s Zollikon Seminars.

Sartre highly esteemed Laing and Esterson’s work on families. Szasz had enormous respect for Esterson; he thought this book was on a higher level than Laing’s other books; he also thought Stadlen’s research following up the eleven families important. Heidegger would surely have loved the book, though it is unlikely he knew it; it embodies that straightforward openness and humanity he tried to convey in his Zollikon seminars, though he might well have asked: ‘Why drag in Sartre?’ Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann of Freiburg, Heidegger’s personal assistant whom he entrusted with editing posthumously his 102-volume Collected Works, and his wife Frau Dr. Veronika von Herrmann, particularly admire Laing and Esterson’s work. But almost all Daseinsanalysts, existential therapists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists – and of course psychiatrists – ignore it.

What did Laing and Esterson say that was so simple: too simple for ‘professionals’ to understand?
‘

We believe that the shift of point of view that these descriptions both embody and demand has an historical significance no less radical than the shift from a demonological to a clinical viewpoint three hundred years ago.

Thus they introduced their great phenomenological descriptions of eleven families of ‘schizophrenics’. But, more than fifty years on, the ‘clinical viewpoint’ still reigns supreme. ‘Existential’, ‘Lacanian’, ‘Laingian’, ‘humanist’, ‘person-centred’ therapists and a galaxy of similarly impressively titled therapists love to call themselves ‘clinicians’.

The great and the good, including younger members of our royal family, seek ‘parity’ for ‘physical’ and ‘mental health’. This is well-intentioned but confusing. Indeed ‘it is good to talk’ – but not in this mystifying, pseudo-scientific language. 

Have Laing and Esterson been proved wrong? They wrote:

Nobody can deny us the right to disbelieve in schizophrenia.

Why, then, do most psychiatrists and psychotherapists claim Laing and Esterson said ‘families cause schizophrenia’? They can not have understood, if they have ever remembered, if they have ever read, the first sentences of the second edition (1970) of the book:

There have been many studies of mental illness and the family. This book is not of them, at least in our opinion.

Hilary Mantel wrote that ‘the simple words the people speak’ in Laing and Esterson’s book gave her, when twenty years old, the courage to write her own books, which have been internationally acclaimed. Her introductions to the seminars in this series have enthralled participants with their sensitive understanding of, and deeply perceptive insight into, each family in turn.

As she has written:

Some of us need a little push, before we recognise we have the right to pick up a pen. In my case it came from a book by the psychiatrists R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family... The people in it seemed close enough to touch... Each interview is a novel or play in miniature. So many of these family conversations seemed familiar to me: their swerves and evasions, their doubleness... For most of my life I had been told that I didn't know how the world worked. That afternoon I decided I did know, after all. In the course of my twenty-one years I'd noticed quite a lot. If I wanted to be a writer, I didn't have to worry about inventing material, I'd already got it. The next stage was just to find some words.

Hilary Mantel, at least, had no difficulty understanding what Laing and Esterson were talking about:

All the patients profiled in the book are young women. I know their names are pseudonyms, but over the years I've wondered desperately what happened to them, and if there's anyone alive who knows, and whether any of them ever cut free from the choking knotweed of miscommunication and flourished on ground of their own: Ruth, who was thought odd because she wore coloured stockings; Jean, who wanted a baby though her whole family told her she didn't; and Sarah, whose breakdown, according to her family, was caused by too much thinking.

(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/06/1)

Anthony Stadlen, through his historical research, is able to answer some of Hilary Mantel’s questions. He continues to interview the eleven families in the twenty-first century. Today, in the eighth of eleven seminars, we shall explore Chapter 8, on ‘Jean Head’ and her family, with the help of Esterson’s original tape recordings on which the book is based; of photographs; and of Stadlen’s reports and recordings of his discussions with Jean and her family: Jean herself, her husband, her father, her brother, her sister-in-law, and her foster-brother.

Your contribution to the dialogue will be warmly welcomed.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  +44 (0) 7809 433 250

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 universities.

Making Sense of the World. Raymond Tallis conducts Inner Circle Seminar 235 (21 May 2017)

Raymond Tallis

Making Sense of the World

Raymond Tallis
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 235
introduced by
Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 21 May 2017
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Raymond Tallis is one of our best-loved invited speakers. He has shown in three profound Inner Circle Seminars that he is one of the world’s leading demystifiers of what he calls the ‘neuroscience delusion’ (‘neuromania’) and the ‘intellectual plague of biologism’ (‘animalism’). His ruthless, good-humoured exposure of reductive natural-scientism continues the tradition of Heidegger and Szasz, but is utterly his own. Psychotherapists are free to choose to go on making fools of themselves by pretending to be ‘validated’ by ‘neuroscience’; but their work, such as it is, speaks for itself, and no pseudo-scientific ‘validation’ can disguise this.

For an account of how Raymond Tallis writes his extraordinary books, see his recent article ‘My writing day: In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’, in The Guardian Review of 29 April 2017:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/29/my-writing-day-raymond-tallis

Raymond Tallis writes about today’s seminar:

The seminar will focus on the idea of a universe, and our lives within it, making sense. There are many dimensions to “making sense”. The comprehensibility celebrated by Einstein is the perceived order of the material world (including ourselves as material bodies). This order can be expressed in equations of increasing generality enabling us to predict its behaviour with ever greater precision and vastly extending our power to act upon it in pursuit of our goals. Religion focusses on the place of human beings in the universe and the God who underpins both its order and the meaning and destiny of human life. Philosophy historically has endeavoured to span both world picture of whatever is current science and the meaning of our lives. The arts and therapy focus very much on the sense we make of our individual and shared lives (or nature seen through the lens of our needs and desires). The seminar will take the form of a series of short (10-15 minute) talks each followed by a discussion.

The Inner Circle Seminars are a quest for truth in the foundations of psychotherapy. Helping clients ‘make sense of the world’ – or, better, exploring and trying to make sense of the world together – is at the heart of what we try to do as psychotherapists. Or is it? Many ‘existential’ therapists dispute that there is such a phenomenon as the world; they see their task as facilitating clients’ exploration of ‘their’ ‘worlds’. Jaspers, Binswanger, von Gebsattel, Minkowski, Straus, Manfred Bleuler saw the ‘worlds’ of the ‘schizophrenic’, the ‘compulsive’, the  ‘manic’ as utterly alien and uncanny. One cannot, declared Jaspers, ‘empathise’ with such people. Buber, despite his talk of the ‘between’, told Rogers, in their famous dialogue, that it was impossible to have an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with an ordinary ‘psychotherapy’ patient, let alone a ‘schizophrenic’. Binswanger, while affirming Buber’s account of ‘I-Thou’ relationships, also affirmed Jaspers’s assertion of the impossibility of ‘empathy’ with the ‘uncanny’ people. But even in the absence of ‘empathy’, claimed Binswanger, his ‘daseinsanalytic’ studies of patients such as Ellen West can make ‘scientific’ sense of ‘their’ alien ‘worlds’. Is not this, far from being an existential advance on Freud, a retrogression to the preFreudian, deterministic, binary psychiatry of ‘degeneracy’? But many ‘existential’ therapists still regard Binswanger’s work as exemplary. On the other hand, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Szasz, Laing, Esterson, and I see all of us as living in the one world, striving to make sense of it together. Heidegger’s Dasein is ‘Being-in-the-world-with-others’ [emphasis added], not each being in a separate encapsulated world. Neither the Talmud’s assertion that each person is a world, nor Lévinas’s insistence on the absolute ‘traumatism’ or ‘infinite height’ of the otherness of the other, contradicts this. Who is right? Which is the true existential tradition? Can this seminar contribute to an answer?

For existential therapists this seminar also raises the question of Viktor Frankl’s widely praised concept of the ‘search for meaning’. Many individuals have found ‘meaning’ in leading lives of utter evil. How can ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’, even Frankl’s later concept of ‘ultimate meaning’, be acceptable ultimate goals for therapy?

It is not reasonable to expect Raymond Tallis to pronounce on questions of psychotherapy: he is not a psychotherapist. But we may perhaps ask him his view on whether we live in the world, or each in his or her world, or whether this is a meaningless distinction. And your view will be warmly welcomed too.


Raymond Tallis was a Professor of Geriatric Medicine and consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly. He has published two hundred research articles in the neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation, as well as a novel, short stories, three volumes of poetry, and thirty books on philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism. He has received many awards and honorary degrees. In 2009, the Economist listed him as one of the world’s twenty leading polymaths.

Nicholas Fearn wrote in The Independent:

When Kirsty Young was asked to name her favourite guest on Desert Island Discs, the rock star Paul Weller was beaten into second place, for her own luxury item would be the writer Raymond Tallis.

Raymond Tallis, whose fourth Inner Circle Seminar this will be, kindly confirms that our seminar structure, in which dialogue is of the essence, enables him to communicate and reflect on his ideas. He wrote, after his first Inner Circle Seminar, The Intellectual Plague of Biologism, on 2 December 2012:

The seminar was for me an incredible experience. I have never previously had the opportunity to discuss the topics we covered in such depth with a group of people who came at it from such different angles but in a way that I found illuminating. I learned a lot. It was a tremendous privilege.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, Durrants Rock, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  +44 (0) 7809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com  stadlenanthony@gmail.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 universities.

Thomas Szasz: 65 years of writing: 1947-2012. Schaler and Stadlen conduct Inner Circle Seminar 234 (12 March 2017)

Thomas Szasz
1970s

Thomas Szasz    Jeffrey Schaler
Szasz’s garden, Manlius, NY
July 2002
Photograph copyright www.szasz.com
Not to be used without permission

Thomas Szasz   Anthony Stadlen   Jeffrey Schaler
Manhattan, 2003

Photograph copyright www.szasz.com

Not to be used without permission



Anthony Stadlen    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

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

Thomas Szasz

65 years of writing
From his first papers (1947)
through his first book (1957)
to his last paper (2012)

Jeffrey Schaler  Anthony Stadlen
conduct
Inner Circle Seminar No. 234
Sunday 12 March 2017
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

We shall examine five of Szasz’s key texts, from the beginning to the end of his astonishing creative journey. His very first paper, a straightforward medical account of how a man who had been given the last rites because of his extreme congestive heart failure was apparently saved by simply increasing his water intake from 1.5 to 6 litres a day, and his second, a psychosomatic study of the role of hostility in peptic ulcer, were published in 1947, 70 years ago. Ten years later, in 1957, his first book Pain and Pleasure: A Study of Bodily Feelings duels with dualism and points forward to The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), while his key paper ‘Commitment of the mentally ill’ announces his lifelong struggle against compulsory psychiatry. His last publication known to me is the paper ‘Varieties of psychiatric criticism’ which he sent me unformatted in an email on 16 August 2012 twenty-three days before his death. Kierkegaard said purity of heart is to will one thing. Szasz’s ‘one thing’ was justice, whether for pope, prince, slave, or ‘mental patient’. Here at the end of his life the 92-year-old Szasz contemplates with passionate dispassionate lack of illusion: psychiatry, ‘antipsychiatry’, ‘Laingian’ psychiatry, ‘Critical Psychiatry’. He condemns them all.

But we shall see how this shaking of the foundations and clearing of the rubble is only the prelude to something profoundly positive. Szasz loved the insufficiently explored potential of true psychotherapy (care for the soul); of decent democracy; and of the accusatorial, adversarial, non-inquisitorial method in law and in a possible new discipline which would replace psychiatry.

Already, as a teenager in Hungary before the second world war, Thomas Szasz had no illusions about either ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental hospitals’. He had concluded that these terms were euphemisms, motivated category mistakes, mystifications intended to invalidate inconvenient or embarrassing people and to justify their incarceration and compulsory ‘treatment’ in psychiatric prisons. As an immigrant to the United States, he developed this position in hundreds of papers and in thirty-five books, including The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and Law, Liberty and Psychiatry (1963), many of which we have studied in Inner Circle Seminars. We have been privileged to have Szasz himself conduct three of these seminars, including one for his ninetieth birthday in 2010.

People have denounced Szasz ever since they began vaguely to register that he was serious when he said he did not believe in ‘mental illness’ or in the so-called ‘commitment’ of the so-called ‘mentally ill’. Psychiatrists say he ‘walked away from’ suffering; psychoanalysts say he was unconscious of the ‘unconscious’; existential therapists say he was a ‘Cartesian dualist’; and all say he discounted the psychological problems of ‘schizophrenics’ and the real threat to society of dangerous ‘mental patients’.

However, these criticisms are not, to put it mildly, soundly based in study of Szasz’s writings. The critics usually have little idea of what Szasz was actually saying or of where he was ‘coming from’. (It must be said that this is true not only of virtually all his adversaries but of virtually all his self-styled admirers and advocates as well.)

Where he was ‘coming from’ is what we shall explore and expound in today’s seminar.

This seminar complements the Inner Circle Seminars on Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) and on Heidegger’s and Boss’s Zollikon Seminars (1959-1969). Szasz’s 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness was the first work referenced in the Laing and Esterson book. All five workers were, during the crucial decade of the 1960s, radically questioning the pseudo-medical concepts of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’, and in particular the concept of ‘schizophrenia’, though Heidegger and Boss clung to the view that psychotherapy was part of medicine.

This is what ‘professionals’, at least as much as ‘lay’ people, find hard to understand. They often seem to think this is all merely a matter of using politically correct language. They argue, for example, that they themselves do not use the ‘stigmatising’ term ‘mental illness’; or, even if they do, they do not believe in ‘pathologising’ patients or clients. They have, they say, a ‘biopsychosocial’ model of ‘mental health’. They do not see that Szasz’s is a fundamental critique of the concepts of ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ as inseparable components of a mystifying and invalidating metaphor. The attempt to cling to the clinical-psychiatric approach while signalling that one has in some unspecified way progressed beyond it was exemplified when President Obama spoke of ‘mental health illnesses’.

The most advanced psychiatric conferences perpetuate this confusion. Well-meaning, hardworking professionals show charts of the waiting times from ‘time of referral’ for ‘service users’ who are said to be ‘experiencing psychosis’ or a ‘mental health crisis’. They report the provision of ‘secure service’ for certain of those so-called ‘service users’: i.e., locking them up and forcibly ‘treating’ them. It is striking that even so-called Open Dialogue advocates often use the same passive jargon of ‘referral’ by others and the attribution that the ‘referred’ person is ‘experiencing psychosis’ rather than having ‘psychosis’ attributed by others.

You may not agree with this assessment, but the heart of these seminars is dialogue, and you will be listened to (and no doubt argued with!) with respect and courtesy if you maintain, to adapt the words of one professor of psychiatry, that Szasz was

‘popular as a sixties kind of guy, an anti-establishment rebel where the facts he distorted were not a problem for the political force of his claims; any smidgin of value he could have had is long eclipsed, and, except as a trip down memory lane, I can see no reason whatsoever why he deserves a [seminar] like this, even a mixed one with opposing views. Dr. Szasz is simply no longer worth it.’

Today’s seminar is conducted by Jeffrey Schaler and Anthony Stadlen, both close friends and colleagues of Thomas Szasz and both recipients of the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties.

Professor Jeffrey A. Schaler is author of Addiction is a Choice (2000), editor of Szasz under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces his Critics (2004), and co-editor of Thomas S. Szasz: The Man and His Ideas (to be published on 31 May 2017).

Jeffrey Schaler conducted Inner Circle Seminar No. 132, Addiction is a Choice, on 12 October 2008, one of the best attended of all Inner Circle Seminars so far. He co-conducted Inner Circle Seminar No. 188, Thomas Szasz: In Memoriam, on 3 March 2013.

Your contribution to the dialogue will be warmly welcomed.

Venue: Durrants Hotel, 26–32 George Street, Marylebone, London W1H 5BJ

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, Durrants rock, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  +44 (0) 7809 433 250

E-mail: stadlen@aol.com, stadlenanthony@gmail.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 universities.