| The Meaning of Mind by Thomas Szasz, 182 pp, $19.95, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1996.  
Hippocrates located the mind in the brain; Descartes, the
soul in the pineal gland; and in 1994, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick reported "Free
Will...in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus."
Diseases of the mind, "mental illnesses," are
even better localized: obsessive compulsive disorder is spotted in the frontal lobes,
homosexuality in the hypothalamus and Schizophrenia is assigned now to Dopamine, now to
Serotonin and now to the neurotransmitter molecule "du jour."
"What's going on here?" asks the author,
rhetorically: "They can't all be right."
Thomas Szasz, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at
State University of New York in Syracuse, thinks they may all be wrong. In this, his 23rd
book, he quotes Hughlings Jackson, the great 19th century British neurologist:
"There is no such entity as consciousness; we are
from moment to moment differently conscious…(consciousness is) the directional
mechanism of attention."
And paying attention (minding), thinking, and even memory
are not bits of neuroanatomy like hippocampal formations. Not all words denote things.
This is an entertaining book, an erudite discourse into
history and philosophy, linguistics and logic. Neurologists, whose authority resides in
the reality of the nervous system, may find it especially pertinent. We must be as clear
as possible in our thinking about the mind and the brain. If they were identical, Dr.
Szasz points out, we wouldn't have two very different words.
This book is a must for those of us who need to deal
rationally with the tempting tales of "neuromythology" issuing daily from the
media, the drug companies, and our psychiatric colleagues. The author argues that most of
the popular mind/brain theorists, in their materialist-reductionist simplifications,
"...are writing science fiction or justifying the medical (psychiatric) control of
deviance or both."
He reminds us that people deceive themselves and others
by twisting words, medicalizing straightforward sins such as bearing false witness into
modern non-entities such as recovered memory syndrome, false memory syndrome, even alien
abduction.
Such literal or "concrete thinking" is supposed
to be a symptom of schizophrenia which according to Dr. Szasz, is the "paradigmatic
metaphoric illness of modernity."
Quoting Immanuel Kant that "to think is to talk to
oneself," the author asserts that thinking is "self-conversation," the
subject acknowledging his inner voices as his own; and that "hearing voices"
(auditory hallucinations, one cardinal "symptom" of Schizophrenia) are
self-conversations that the subject disowns, attributing his inner voices to other
"speakers" such as God, the FBI, etc.
Tenacious in this central criticism of schizophrenia
since his Myth of Mental Illness was published in 1961, Dr. Szasz speculates that
"...never before in history have so many educated people wasted so much time and
money as have diverse professionals squandered on studying this nonexistent illness."
The Meaning of Mind is an easy but scholarly read, alive
with quotes. Dr. Szasz leads us through six chapters:
- Thought: Self-Conversation
- Responsibility: Self-blame and Self-Praise
- Memory: Fabricating the Past and the Future
- Brain: The Abuse of Neuroscience
- Mind: The History of an Idea
- Modernity's Master Metaphors: Mental Illness and Mental
Treatment
Here's a work of philosophy, true love of logic, with
relevance for daily life. It will open your mind - metaphorically, of course. |
