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Diagnosis as Self-Understanding & Self-Alienation

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I have said before that almost everyone in the psy-disciplines (even psychiatry, yes) dislikes, disdains, disregards, or begrudgingly tolerates the DSM but they do so for wildly different reasons. This is understandable as different complaints exist in the context of different clinical, scientific, and social goals. One set of grievances that frequently comes up pertains to the allegedly pernicious influence of the DSM on how we relate to our own emotional lives. In particular, it is said to have alienated us from the nature of our psychological difficulties. This line of thinking is expressed quite well by the psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams in the article Diagnosis and Its Discontents: Reflections on Our Current Dilemma (2021): “One interesting (and, to a therapist, somewhat disconcerting) side-effect of the 1980 change toward descriptive and categorical psychiatric diagnosis involves the ways people in Western cultures have begun talking about themselves since the DSM-III paradigm sh

I have said before that almost everyone in the psy-disciplines (even psychiatry, yes) dislikes, disdains, disregards, or begrudgingly tolerates the DSM but they do so for wildly different reasons. This is understandable as different complaints exist in the context of different clinical, scientific, and social goals. One set of grievances that frequently comes up pertains to the allegedly pernicious influence of the DSM on how we relate to our own emotional lives. In particular, it is said to have alienated us from the nature of our psychological difficulties. This line of thinking is…

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