Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

The bitterness still resonates forty-three years later from a brilliant piece of sociopolitical theater by Torrey, published in 1977 in Psychology Today. In “A Fantasy Trial about a Real Issue,” he imagined a trial of the psychoanalytic establishment for the harm done to mothers of people with schizophrenia. “No trial since Nuremberg has stirred so much public interest,” he facetiously reported about the supposed mass trial held in a stadium in DC. He noted the charges: “The accused did willfully and with forethought but no scientific evidence blame the parents of patients with schizophrenia . . . for their children’s condition thereby causing great anguish guilt pain and suffering.” Defendants included Fromm-Reichmann, Klein, Bateson, and Theodore Lidz, who claimed that parents of schizophrenics are “narcissistic” and “egocentric.” All were convicted and sentenced to spend ten years reading their own writings. He finished with an acidic flourish, “Relatives wept openly. Nobody had expected that harsh a sentence.” Eleanor Owen had a movingly different take on it. Despite the fury that drove the advocacy that ultimately helped move mountains, despite the shame and guilt heaped on people like her by ideologues preaching a judgmental pseudoreligion free of facts, she still says, “But there were no villains.”[*],[31]