«Мое святая святых — это... свобода от силы и лжи, в чем бы последние две ни выражались».
Этими словами Чехова из письма к издателю профессор Томас Сас предварил предисловие к изданию русского перевода своего фундаментального труда — «Миф душевной болезни».
«Вера в свободу: практики психиатрии и принципы либертарианства», написанная спустя 43 года, представляет наиболее глубокое рассмотрение Томасом Сасом угроз личной свободе, порождаемых слиянием психиатрии и государства.
Почему и как лучшие умы Запада, размышлявшие о политической и экономической свободе, теряют присутствие духа перед психиатрической покровительственной риторикой?
Ответы на этот вопрос — на примерах Дж. С. Милля и Б. Рассела, Айн Рэнд и Р. Нозика, Л. фон Мизеса и Ф. Хайека, М. Ротбарда и Д. Макклоски — вооружают обычного человека фундаментальным пониманием проблем повседневного существования, которое, строго говоря, читатель вряд ли отыщет где-либо еще.
Книга будет полезна врачам, юристам, и каждому, кто интересуется как проблемами экономики и психиатрии, так и понятиями свободы и ответственности.
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.
"My holy of holies is ... freedom from violence and lies in whatever form they express themselves". With this citation from Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's letter to his publisher, Dr. Szasz started his foreword to the Russian edition of his fundamental work "The Myth of the Mental Illness."
The "Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices"written 43 years later, provides the deepest one among the considerations, written by Dr. Szasz, of the threats to personal freedom, created by the merger of the state and psychiatry.
How and why the best minds of the West who have ever contemplated the issues of political and economic freedom, are loosing the presence of mind, when encountering the paternalistic rhetorics of psychiatry?
The answers to this question, considered with stellar examples from classics of liberalism to creators of the Austrian school of economics and to leading libertarians of the present time, are equipping the average person with the fundamental understanding of the problems of daily existence, which, strictly speaking, the reader is unlikely to find anywhere else.
In addition to everyone, the book will be useful to doctors, lawyers, and anyone interested in the issues of either economics and psychiatry, or the concepts of freedom and responsibility.