Enter Thomas Szasz
In addition to Eric Berne, the current psychiatry project also considers Thomas Szasz, an important figure in the related anti-psychiatry and deinstitutionalization movements. The paper I’m currently working on as I write this update attempts to work out their relationship to one another and their relative importance to some of the intellectual currents of the time, notably the interdisciplinary formation we know as “game theory.” I’m writing this down to help clarify for myself what got me hooked on these two unusual figures.
I noticed the connection between them when I was seriously reading Games People Play. As I mentioned before, the book is dated and problematic in all kinds of ways. Nevertheless, I found it compelling as an intellectual document. One of the reasons that I found it so interesting is because my most important work at the time was a civic project that involved facilitating weekly group therapy with youth in jail who were facing adult charges. One of my co-facilitators was an older psychiatric social worker whose day job was in a state mental hospital. I’ve written about this elsewhere, if anyone is curious. It was a weird chapter of life. Knowing a little bit about Berne’s “transactional analysis” gave me at least one way of understanding the work we were doing, however dated his concepts.
But apart from its use in this specific and unusual collaboration, I have to admit that I found some of the “game analysis” verified in daily experience. My professional life kept showing me examples of Berne’s “Why Don’t You — Yes But” (YDYB) game. It had a bit of Myers-Briggs or Enneagram to it, the same parlor-game kind of appeal. Berne, however, didn’t see it as a parlor-game. When I looked at his footnotes, it was clear he saw it as a science. And it was clear that he saw it as a species of “game theory.” I’ve seen some confirmatory evidence in the Grove Press archives that suggest it wasn’t just Berne who saw it that way. I’m hoping to work it into this paper.
Berne’s collection of interlocutors for “game analysis” was an interesting collection of people, listed in the footnotes for his theoretical chapter: Stephen Potter’s book on Gamesmanship (a book I always thought of as a piece of popular humor writing), George Herbert Mead (a serious philosopher), and Thomas Szasz (a name that was altogether new to me). Berne also mentioned The San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminar, which remains an intriguing institution to me. The Szasz citation was the most provocative. His book was called The Myth of Mental Illness, which seemed like an echo of my graduate-school reading of Foucault. Only I noticed that Szasz’s book appeared in 1961, the same year Foucault published Folie et déraison, a tantalizing coincidence.
But what made Szasz interesting for me, at the time, was how much he was involved in the relationship between psychiatry and the courts. Learning as much as I could about Szasz during the same months that I was spending one evening per week in jail alongside a psychiatric social worker made me aware of the relationship between mental health systems and the application of the law. It made Szasz more sympathetic to me, for better or for worse. It certainly helped me see the scope of the problem he was writing about, and its stakes.