> Marta Russell wrote:
> > Civil libertarians are not "anti-therapeutic".
> > Where do you get this from?
> > The plans I have seen developed by the Soros Institute and others do
> > not dump therapy or medicines from the regimen....what they do is
> > promote community living, community supports, housing, etc. that it
> > make it possible to live with a mental disability without being shut
> > away in some institution. These supports are largely missing now.
> >
> > Yes Andrew Goldstein sought help - he was not incapable of that. The
> > tragic thing was that help was so incompetent.
> >
> > Marta
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
> What I meant to criticize is the tendency towards a political stance that gives
> primary emphasis to the supposedly self-actualizing individual. This can be one of
> the points at which the right makes inroads on the left. Thomas Szasz is a gross
> example.
If the Left is the party of freedom and equality, and the Right the party of power, authority, social status, private wealth, hierarchical order and so on, then the concept of the autonomous individual is not an inroad of the Right on the Left but rather a rightist simulacrum which the authoritarian corruption of the Left gives space to and even advertises. A gate opens in two directions, and the ideas of Thomas Szasz could be an opportunity for leftist inroads on the Right, but only if there were leftists who could deatomize personal freedom without proposing to do away with it.
This impinges on notions of therapy, because therapy is often a code for preserving the social order. In that case the force or fraud which is used to impose it on its objects is a crucial and revealing nexus. So the question here is just what people mean by _therapy_ -- whose will will be done.