The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience. Thomas Szasz. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, 182 pp., $19.95. Most of the weight of Thomas Szasz's attack on the myth of mental illness has, at least in his more recent works (e.g., 1987, 2001), been aimed at the unwarranted extension of the definition of disease propounded by Virchow (1847) to behaviors that are distressing to and unwanted by those members of a person's family and of society generally who are in a position to make their discomfort felt-that is, to enforce compliance with family and societal norms by a number of means whether the offending individual likes it or not. Having dispatched the illness half of the myth, Szasz now attacks the other half: the very existence of mind. The Meaning of Mind was published some 8 years ago; that is, after Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1987), and before Pharmacracy : Medicine and Politics in America (2001). Nevertheless I believe that the issues in it with which he grapples are so important to his oeuvre that a belated review can be justified. [Eight years is not such a long time as these things go: MacCorquodale's contribution to Dews's Festschrift for B. F. Skinner (1970) was a "retrospective appreciation" of Verbal Behavior 13 years later-long after it might have mitigated the adverse impact of Chomsky's (1959) misconceived review.] In The Meaning of Mind, Dr. Szasz extends his already prodigious reach into the fundamental issue of the field: what RyIe (1949) termed "the concept of mind." There are barely 140 pages of text in the work, but more than enough to stimulate and challenge those behavioral scientists who are already concerned that our field, and certainly our clinical practice, rest on very flimsy foundations. Mentalism has been with us a long time. Until the Iliad it was, in various animistic forms, the Zeitgeist of the Neolithic cultures (Berman, 1981), and it is not likely to depart anytime soon, at least among the general public. To say, for example, that one has "changed one's mind," seems harmless enough. It is a shortcut for asserting that certain, possibly unspecified, events have now occurred that have occasioned one's doing, seeing, saying, or feeling things differently from the way one did some time earlier. It is a language game played au Wittgenstein; but it has been a game with very serious consequences. Szasz has not been entirely alone in his attack on the mentalism and unwanted behavior "game" (cf. Foucault, 1965), but there can be no question that his name has become synonymous with the arguments put forward. Uttal has noted well that "(T)he introduction of the connotatively loaded term 'mind' brings us to the very outermost fringes of our neuroscientific-psychological lexicon. Some mental terminology (e.g., consciousness, awareness, perception) is so vague and means so many different things to different people that great confusion is created even when reasonable people discuss relevant issues" (1998, p. 140). He adds that quite a variety of people: Hull, Skinner, Watson, Locke, Hume, Mill, Comte, Carnap, Schlick, and Wittgenstein "all sought to avoid the linguistic and philosophical difficulties that arise when these terms are injected into scientific discourse" (1998, p. 140). In The Meaning of Mind, then, Szasz appears to be attempting to finesse these difficulties through the tactic of changing the noun "mind" to the verb "minding." He asserts that humans engage in a continuous "internal dialogue" with themselves that he terms an "autologue." This internal dialogue presumably forms the basis of mind or consciousness and it is also assumed to underlie all sentient action. One wag has suggested that the question is not: Do animals think but, rather, do we7. Szasz would answer, with Kant, "Yes. To think is to talk to oneself (p. 19). Sartre, according to Murdoch (1953, p. 14), took a similar position: "What is a thought? …