Let us regard the story of Adam and Eve not as literal history but as a poetic hint at the psycho-social transformation of man and human nature. What does it tell us? After indulging in his morally expensive meal, Adam was never the same again: Henceforth he knew right from wrong! In brief, his self developed from irresponsibility and naive trust in God, to responsibility and, let us hope, skepticism toward authority.
Did Adam have a choice in deciding whether or not to eat the apple? The parable implies that he had. Why, then, did he choose to accept the serpent’s offer rather than God’s? If Adam were a patient and I his analyst, I would probably tell him that he decided as he had because he preferred that course to its alternative. In other words, might we not say that Adam chose knowledge and responsibility, and, to gain these, rejected God’s seductive offer of a perpetual vacation in His garden? He thus refused help, tranquillity, welfare—even psychiatric therapy, in a sense—if these benefits could be obtained only at the cost of sacrificing truth and responsibility. Instead, he chose the joys of knowledge and mastery, and the sorrows of loneliness and guilt. What had been God’s plaything became a person.
If Adam had committed his crime in England after 1843, his offense might have been exculpated on the basis of the M’Naghten formula. For clearly Adam did not know right from wrong. He became aware of that distinction only after the crime. And yet, if he could not distinguish one of his interests from another, why did he choose venturesome knowledge in preference to secure ignorance?
Adam rejected God’s offer of irresponsible bliss. If Adam refused to be seduced by God—who tempted him no less than did the serpent—why should we accept our fellowman’s offer of much shoddier therapies, intended to relieve us of our moral burdens, which, in our ignorance, we fail to recognize as our very humanity.
Many modem psychotherapists have adopted, as their credo, Socrates’ declaration that the unexamined life is not worth living. But for modem man this is not enough. We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living either.
Thomas Szasz – Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry