Labeling madness Book

What stellar reading. Szasz illuminates for us one of the great thinkers of our age, who unfortunately has been (by and large) forgotten. I only encountered Kraus after surveying Walter Benjamin's influences. What this book delivered was a reconstruction of an intense intellectual battle between Kraus and Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. What was the battle over? Language and it's place in the salvation of humanity. Through excellent scholarship Szasz provides a daunting picture of the original Psychoanalytic movement in Vienna, and the detrimental and deleterious consequences of Freud's own whimsy. Further than a titillating piece of historical drama, Szasz continually returns to how each figure viewed language and its place in understanding the human mind.

Kraus saw one's language as a deep reflection of who they were as a human being, and how problems in one's use of language reflected actual problems. Moreover, he saw the visceral and organic power of language that could penetrate across time and space. Like Kraus, Freud was deeply attuned to the power of language and its relation to the psyche. Freud saw one's language archeologically to uncover sickness. Freud's remedy included cataloging behaviour under cold pseudoscientific language, and a psychotherapeutic prescription. The pseudoscientific language was - and is - dehumanizing, and the interpretation of the "patient's" language was - and remains - (often enough) arbitrarily determined against a framework that was constructed by a man who was also deeply flawed. Kraus saw it differently - the people weren't reducible to this fragile problematic framework, and moreso were not reducible to brutally dehumanizing pseudoscientific neologisms. Kraus didn't pretend to have a universal framework that would net the woes of humanity and the tragedies of language; and he certainly did not want "Krausianism." He saw dignity and humanity.

But anyway, that's enough out of me. Read the book; it's good. Kraus reminds me a lot of another underrated figure who was famous in his day for his integrity and care - Lessing.