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From Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences by Thomas S. Szasz. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 1987:

" Arieti was sincere about the literal reality of psychiatry's sacred
symbol, and was duly rewarded for his faith by the keepers of the
psychiatric keys. But sincerity is not necessarily a virtue. Assuredly, it is
not a virtue when what the writer is sincere about is his firm belief that
anyone who disagrees with him on a fumdamental tenet of the psychi-
atric faith can be doing so only because he is insane. Many modern
thinkers have faulted psychiatry and psychoanalysis for this debauch-
ment of the rules of intellectual debate, but perhaps none severely
enough. Isaiah Berlin, for example, although much troubled by this
tactic, leans over backwards to excuse Freud for his role in promoting it
and giving it a semblance of intellectual integrity. 'Freud, too,' writes
Berlin, 'contributed to this; not in his work of genius . . . but as the
originator, however innocent, of the misapplication of rational psycho-
logical and social methods by muddle-headed men of good will and
quacks and false prophets of every hue.' After thus making the obli-
gatory gestures of deference to Freud, the mythic hero, Berlin articu-
lates elegantly the ugliness exemplified by Arieti's previously quoted
statement:

'It was left to the twentieth century to do something more drastic than this.
For the first time it was now conceived that the most effective way of dealing
with questions, particularly those recurrent issues which had perplexed and
often tormented original and honest minds in every generation, was not by
employing the tools of reason . . . but by obliterating the questions them-
selves . . . . Questions for whose solution no ready-made technique could
easily be produced are all too easily classified as obsessions from which the
patient must be cured.' "(Berlin, I. Four Essays on Liberty London:
Oxford University Press, 1969. Page 23)





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