EP95 Invited Address 02b – The Healing Word: Its Past, Present and Future – Thomas Szasz, MD

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Invited Address Session 2 Part 2 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 – The Healing Word: Its Past, Present and Future
Featuring Thomas Szasz, MD, with discussant Paul Watzlawick, PhD.
Moderated by Michael Munion, MA.

In the ancient world, the philosopher was a physician of the soul who, employing the healing word (iatroi /ogoi), offered counsel to persons perplexed by problems in living. After the triumph of Christianity, the priest as confessor-counselor replaced the philosopher as rhetorician of consolation. With the birth of psychiatry, and especially since the Freudian revolution, we call helping persons with words “psychotherapy.” I shall try to show that without a decisive separation of rhetorical healing from medical healing, psychotherapy as the secular cure of souls is doomed to extinction.

 

Educational Objectives:

1. To demonstrate that psychotherapy ought to be viewed as a moral-religious, rather than as a medical-therapeutic, enterprise.
2. To demonstrate that the thesis that psychotherapy is inherently ineffective, as often advanced by critics, is logically incoherent.
3. Given a client, articulate the impact of the economic context in which psychotherapy takes place on the ”therapeutic” character of the enterprise itself.