Thomas Szasz (and Jenny Price)

“I am utterly devoted to Thomas Szasz and his legacy; as far as I can tell, everything wrong with the universe could be solved if people would simply understand and live by what he taught.” —Jenny Price

Jenny Price has been reading Thomas Szasz and has now elevated him from “interesting thinker” to something closer to patron saint of clear language and personal liberty. She is especially taken with his insistence that therapy should remain conversation rather than becoming a way to disguise moral judgments and value systems as science. His argument that psychiatric language can turn conflict, distress, or nonconformity into “illness” has left her nearly reverential. In Jenny’s telling, Szasz did not merely notice that words matter; he saw the hidden machinery beneath them, exposed how institutions use medical language to make power look neutral, and then calmly explained what everyone else had somehow failed to see.

She is equally devoted to his idea of the “therapeutic state”: a society in which the state increasingly uses medicine, psychiatry, diagnosis, and treatment as instruments of social control, replacing older forms of religious or legal authority with supposedly benevolent clinical power. To Jenny, this is less a theory than a revelation carved into stone. Chris Price, Jenny’s mother, can confirm that Dick Price—Jenny’s father—also admired Szasz, which allows Jenny to regard her devotion not as excessive hero worship but as a distinguished family inheritance. She is not placing Thomas Szasz on a pedestal. She is merely constructing the pedestal, polishing it daily, and objecting on philosophical grounds to anyone who calls it a pedestal.