The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary

by Thomas Szasz

Szasz attacks the sacred cows of contemporary American society. In his acerbic and aphoristic style he rails against the hypocrisy and fraudulence of the futile and murderous war against drugs, the sordid and often self-seeking practices of psychotherapy and the atrocities of psychiatry.

Genres: Psychology, Mental Health, Nonfiction

200 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Thomas Stephen Szasz (pronounced /sas/; born April 15, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary) was a psychiatrist and academic. He was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He was a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement, a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. He is well known for his books, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement which set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.

Reviews

[Joe Sabet · Rating 2 out of 5]

His message needs to be heard, but his adages in this book are redundant and a bit self righteous. I wonder if he was influenced by Foucault or vice versa because their views on psychiatry appear similar to me. Szasz lays out a lot of different views but his political libertarianism just doesn't appeal to me. I got the feel after a while that he is a rigid thinker and shortsighted a lot of the time.

[Peter Schutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”

“You can't teach an old dog new tricks; but you can an old man. That's one of the differences between dogs and persons.”

“When no one believed any longer in the politicians, it was medicine, with its amazing discoveries, that captured the imagination of the human race. It is medicine that has come to replace both religion and politics in our time.”

[Tom Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because Bryan Caplan suggested it as a starting point for getting into Szasz. While I found some of them to be insightful, others fell short of that mark. Also, Szasz does leave footnotes, but a lot of the references are dated, so it often would have been better to have more context.