Books in Brief: The Second Sin

The Second Sin, by Thomas Szasz (Doubleday, 121 pp., $5.95). Author of The Myth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness, and other works pushing his view that enforced therapy is a crime which “like rape, should be prohibited and punished by the criminal law,” Dr. Szasz takes on now the “sin” of speaking clearly. In a series of clipped, concise paragraphs about marriage, sex, drugs, psychotherapy, ethics, feminism, suicide, and other matters, he takes a leaf from his hero Orwell, who observed that “political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” and gives the back of his hand to his villains, tyrants ranging from the political (Stalin, Hitler) to the therapeutic, like Freud. Uncompromisingly libertarian, joyfully iconoclastic, frequently insightful, possessed of a biting style, Dr. Szasz lives up to his reputation as America’s most perverse psychiatrist. He discerns the manifold evils not only in Communist society but also in our own: compulsory conformism, mindless obedience, blind faith. “Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelation,” he insists, sticking needles into Negro fanatics, drug proselytizers, psychiatric zealots, and others who’ve made speaking clearly an endangered American species of communication. Unlike the liberals whom he obviously detests, Szasz believes in the existence of Good and Evil, a shocking and unfashionable idea. When you send a copy of Second Sin to your very favorite Supreme Court Justice, mark this passage: “There can be no humane penology so long as punishment masquerades as ‘correction.’ No person or group has the right to ‘correct’ a human being; only God does. But persons and groups have the right to protect themselves through sanctions that are, and should be called, ‘punishments,’ which, of course, may be as mild as a scolding or a small fine, or as severe as life imprisonment or death.”

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D. J. C. Brudnoy

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The Second Sin, by Thomas Szasz (Doubleday, 121 pp., $5.95). Author of The Myth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness, and other works pushing his view that enforced therapy is a crime which “like rape, should be prohibited and punished by the criminal law,” Dr. Szasz takes on now the “sin” of speaking clearly. In a series of clipped, concise paragraphs about marriage, sex, drugs, psychotherapy, ethics, feminism, suicide, and other matters, he takes a leaf from his hero Orwell, who observed that “political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” and gives the back of his hand to his villains, tyrants ranging from the political (Stalin, Hitler) to the therapeutic, like Freud. Uncompromisingly libertarian, joyfully iconoclastic, frequently insightful, possessed of a biting style, Dr. Szasz lives up to his reputation as America’s most perverse psychiatrist. He discerns the manifold evils not only in Communist society but also in our own: compulsory conformism, mindless obedience, blind faith. “Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelation,” he insists, sticking needles into Negro fanatics, drug proselytizers, psychiatric zealots, and others who’ve made speaking clearly an endangered American species of communication. Unlike the liberals whom he obviously detests, Szasz believes in the existence of Good and Evil, a shocking and unfashionable idea. When you send a copy of Second Sin to your very favorite Supreme Court Justice, mark this passage: “There can be no humane penology so long as punishment masquerades as ‘correction.’ No person or group has the right to ‘correct’ a human being; only God does. But persons and groups have the right to protect themselves through sanctions that are, and should be called, ‘punishments,’ which, of course, may be as mild as a scolding or a small fine, or as severe as life imprisonment or death.”