This address is a radical inquiry into voluntary death ("death control"). Is suicide legal? Should involuntary suicide prevention be legal? Should physician-assisted suicide be legal? Personal careers, professional identities, multi-billion dollar industries, legal doctrines, judicial procedures and the liberty of every American hangs on our answers and on our justifications for them.
Szasz considers the role of responsibility in religion, civil and criminal law, medicine and the mental health professions; the differences among existential responsibility, moral blameworthiness and legal accountability; that connections between (mental) competence and responsibility; and relates all of the above to problems in psychotherapeutic theory and practice.
This workshop is a phenomenology of melancholy. Jungian approaches to depression; clinical treatments, societal implications, resistances, suicidal risks and practical techniques will be demonstrated. The 50-minute, prizewinning BBC Documentary "Kind of Blue," narrated by the presenter will be featured.
Invited Address Session 8 - Part 2 - Justifying Coercion Through Theology and Therapy featuring Thomas S Szasz, MD.
With discussant Rollo R May, PhD.
Moderated by Harold Arkowitz, PhD.
Ronald Laing (1985) interviews a home-less woman diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Her presenting complaint is that her brain does not work right and that people are out to get her. Laing relates to the client and explores her theories of human conspiracy, the power of the mind and mind reading, issues of Christianity, and how these concepts relate to her.