The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality & Neuroscience

by Thomas Szasz

In this brilliantly original and highly accessible work, Thomas Szasz demonstrates the futility of analyzing the mind as a collection of brain functions. Instead of trying to unravel the riddle of a mythical entity called the mind, Szasz suggests that our task should be to understand and judge persons always as moral agents responsible for their own actions, not as victims of brain chemistry. This is Szasz's most ambitious work to date. In his best-selling book, The Myth of Mental Illness , he took psychiatry to task for misconstruing human conflict and coping as mental illness. In Our Right to Drugs , he exposed the irrationality and political opportunism that fuels the Drug War. In The Meaning of Mind , he warns that we misconstrue the dialogue within as a problem of consciousness and neuroscience, and do so at our own peril.

In The Meaning of Mind , Thomas Szasz argues that only as a verb does the word mind mean something in the real world, namely, attending or heeding. Minding is the ability to pay attention and adapt to one's environment by using language to communicate with others and oneself. Viewing the mind as a potentially infinite variety of self-conversations is the key that unlocks many of the mysteries we associate with this concept. Modern neuroscience is a misdirected effort to explain mind in terms of brain functions. The claims and conclusions of the diverse academics and scientists who engage in this enterprise undermine the concepts of moral agency and personal responsibility. Szasz shows that the cognitive function of speech is to enable us to talk not only to others but to ourselves (in short, to be our own interlocutor), and that the view that mind is brain―embraced by both the scientific community and the popular press―is not an empirical finding but a rhetorical ruse concealing humanity's unceasing struggle to control persons by controlling the vocabulary. The discourse of brain-mind, unlike the discourse of man as moral agent, protects people from the dilemmas intrinsic to holding themselves responsible for their own actions and holding others responsible for theirs. Because we live in an age blessed by the fruits of materialist science, reductionist explanations of the relationship between brain and mind are more popular today than ever, making this book an indispensible addition to the seemingly recondite debate about, simply, who we are.

Genres: Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Mental Health

200 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 1996

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

[Malin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic book! a thought provoking overview of our desire to make fluid phenomena static in order to dress it up in a scientific outfit. Our societys unwillingness to accept and ascribe responsibility to actions and hide behind scientific metaphors is unbelievable and Szasz paints the picture convincingly in this book. Together with his Myth of mental illness, I consider this the best book by Szasz.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I found this book a bit confusing, jumping from topic to topic in a kind of manic fury.

Szasz argues, throughout, that the mind must be distinguished from the brain. The brain can be diseased but the mind cannot. While I agree that the mind is not identical with the brain, Szasz does not seem to acknowledge that all diseases, even those of the body and brain, are diseases within a certain social context, a context, for example, that values a healthy body and longevity (most, if not all societies). Something similar, I believe, can be said about mental illnesses. While mental illnesses seem to correlate with certain anomolous brain structures, we generally only hold such anomalies to be problematic if the correlating behavior is also problematic. We don't, for example, say today that the brains of left-handed individuals are ill or diseased because we don't pathlogize the corresponding behavior - left-handedness. Something similar, I think, can be said about schizophrenia - we only take the corresponding brain structures, such as enlarged ventricles, to be indicators of illness because we take, as a society, schizophrenia to be an illness.

This is all to say that I don't think Szasz goes far enough in identifying the social context of diseases.

Finally, I want to quote, at length, Szasz's criticism of reductionism which, I think, is well put:

I dare say there is something bizarre about the materialist-reductionist's denial of persons. To be sure, brains in craniums exist; and so do persons in societies. The material substrates of a human being - a person - are organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. The material substrates of a human artifact - say a wedding ring - are crystals, atoms, electrons in orbits, and so forth. Scientists do not claim to be able to explain the economic or emotional value of a wedding ring by identifying its material composition; nor do they insist that a physicalistic account of its structure is superior to a cultural and personal account of its meaning. Yet, many scientists, from physicists to neurophysiologists, claim that they can explain choice and responsibility by identifying its material substrate. . . . Indeed, in recent decades the canons of respectable scholarship and respectable jouralism alike have virtually mandated that we view only biological-reductionist explanations of human bevaior as scientific. (140)

[Claire · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jesus. Where do I begin with this. I suppose by starting out stating that I read this book as research and not on a personal whim and I already know that I dislike Szasz and his theories, so this was doomed from the beginning. Somehow, though, this book shimmied its way under the incredibly low bar that I had set for it. It's striking how much Szasz's argumentative skills seemed to have devolved in his later years. I strongly disagreed with the ideas he set out in The Myth of Mental Illness, published about 3 decades prior to this, but his arguments were surprisingly convincing in them. He argued them thoroughly, usually level-headedly, and with the help of copious insightful examples. Nowhere was this to be found in The Meaning of the Mind. He threw in a couple of biased, loosely related examples here and there and mostly just went on angry rants about his hatred of science. And some of it was just so needless - did he need to go off on a factually incorrect and abhorrent tangent about how women apparently lie about being sexually assaulted? Nope, but it's in there. He also seems to have lost his empathy in the decades since The Myth of Mental Illness. While his argument in there is deeply invalidating, he still gets across that the people who are labelled as mentally ill are suffering and should be helped (albeit through inaccessible private practice, but that's another criticism for another day). In this book, he goes off on how apparently so many murderers and criminals are not being sentenced to prison because of the diagnosis of schizophrenia which is, again, incorrect. He does not extend any sympathy to those labelled mentally ill and is outright hostile to them throughout. Listen, I'm no fan of the medical model of mental illness and I have a myriad of critiques about it. That's not my issue with Szasz and his arguments. This is just absolutely the textbook example of the wrong way to go about critiquing - well, anything, but specifically the medical model of mental illness. (I know that supposedly this book is about the mind in general, but he is clearly tailoring the argument to his agenda throughout.)
This book is poorly argued, upsetting to read due not only to content but to his tone, and honestly? Genuinely harmful. I'm glad there's barely any reviews of this on Goodreads because this is not a book that should be read without an extremely thick layer of critical thinking.

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Szasz is a lot of fun to read. This book is from 1996, and centers around—see the title—the notion of "mind". Szasz argues it is a mistake (although a common one) to use that word as a noun. It should be used solely as a verb. As in: "Mind your own businesss". "Minding" is an activity, your self-communication to make decisions and guide actions.

Szasz is especially contemptuous of determinists who equate the "mind" with one's brain, and deniers of "free will". I'm on his side here.

One advantage of reading older books: you get to read how confident predictions made decades ago turned out. For example, on pp. 77-8, Szasz quotes from a 1995 Time article, still online: "Glimpses of the Mind". Why, science is on the verge of letting us "clarify the mysteries of consciousness but also to understand and treat such devastating mind malfunctions as Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage -- research projects have multiplied dramatically."

And that's why, 30 years later, nobody suffers any more from Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage. Thanks to dramatically multiplied research projects!

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

He espoused a false dichotomy to support his opinion. He believed that people with schizophrenia were liars who lied to themselves. An old book that is perhaps left in the past.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Mr. Szasz has a difficult name to spell like mine for one thing. However, all chuckles aside, Thomas Szasa shows the humor of our interpetations of what we percieve, the history of some aspects how we view the world, ourselves and the historionics which affect our perceptions, apperceptions and the ways in which we view what we know about ourselves and constructs which color our views of society. In addition Thomas Szasz in his wisdom of experience directs us to aspects which are humorous in how we see. I found myself laughing at his wise observations of the viewpoints we/as individuals and society sees the world around us. This is well worth the time spent reading.

[John Hancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

What did I think? What is thinking? What do you think thinking is? Think about it.
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