That's not the issue I'm attempting to notice, however. The way I see it, views like Szasz's should be assigned to the Left even if they're wrong-headed. Authoritarian psychiatry and authoritarian drug regulation, even carried out by social democrats or alleged socialists, should be assigned to the Right -- they are an attempt by an elite class to impose a preferred political order by force.
I wanted to know how Szasz was allowed to become a "rightist". My question was a larger take on the well-known struggles about guns, sex, drugs, and many similar issues where somehow the Left is rung in as the enemy, not the proponent, of freedom and equality _by_leftists_.
The remarks about Skinner were interesting, but while I agree the mechanisms of persuasion are subtle and powerful, in the case of many of the issues at hand we are talking not about induced consent but the use of force. In the case of the Drug War and some phases of psychiatry, Szasz is taking about cops, courts, prisons, and death, not merely deception and false consciousness. His objections are _leftist_ objections: he thinks the objects of the authorities' attentions should have the power to refuse them and mind their own business. He assumes, of course, that individuals may exist autonomously in the first place, an idea which Skinner seems to have questioned.
The idea that individuals or their consciousnesses are socially produced seems contrary to ordinary experience. If consciousness appeared independent of the biological substrate (that is, the individual body) then societies ought to be able to produce multiple consciousnesses in a single body, single consciousnesses residing in multiple bodies, completely unconscious yet fully functioning bodies (the zombies mentioned elsewhere) and entirely disembodied consciousnesses. But this is not what we generally observe. At least, societies require a sort of biological slug to stamp a consciousness on, in all but a few cases just one at a time. The picky, resistant substrate must be doing something after all -- just as our experience tells us.
However, even with this limitation, the theory that societies create the individuals that compose them is an invitation for totalitarian intervention on a grand scale. Obviously, the slugs who receive the "wrong" impression during consciousness- stamping simply need to be reimpressed, or perhaps melted down as hopeless cases. Regardless of the correctness of this theory, it is certainly not an anarchist theory; it is centered on a ruler, the ruler of stamping machines.
As an alternative, I'd suggest imagining for a moment that the individual and the collective are two different complementary aspects, perhaps even arbitrary objectifications, of a single being, and that where there is a human there is someone to whom harm can be done, the subject of a life as the animal-rights folks put it.