12 quotes
The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines “buggery” as “heresy, sodomy.”
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to “treat” this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)