On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics - Softcover

Verhaeghe, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590510895 ISBN 13: 9781590510896

Publisher: Other Press, 2004

Synopsis

Winner of the 2005 Goethe Award in Psychoanalytic Scholarship

The central argument of On Being Normal and Other Disorders is that psychic identity is acquired through one's primary intersubjective relationships. Thus, the diagnosis of potential pathologies must also be founded on this relation. Given that the efficacy of all forms of treatment depends upon the therapeutic relation, a diagnostic of this sort has wide-ranging applications.

Paul Verhaeghe's critical evaluation of the contemporary DSM-diagnostic shows that the lack of reference to an updated governing metapsychology impinges on the therapeutic value of the DSM categories. In response to this problem, the author sketches out the foundations of such a metapsychology by combining a Freudo-Lacanian approach with contemporary empirical research. Close attention is paid to the processes of identity acquisition to show how the self and the Other are not two separate entities. Rather, subject formation is seen as a process in which both the subject's and the Other's identity, as well as the relationship between them, comes into being.

By engaging this new theoretical approach in a constant dialogue with the findings of contemporary research, this book provides a compass for the practical applications of such a differential diagnostic. Post-modern categories of anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders are approached both through the well-known neurotic, psychotic, and perverse structures, as well as through the less familiar distinction between an actual pathology and a psychopathology. These two outlooks, which involve the role of language and the subject's relation to the Other, are spelled out to show their implications for treatment at every turn.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Verhaeghe

Paul Verhaeghe is senior professor at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and head of the Department for Psychoanalysis and Counseling Psychology. He teaches clinical psychodiagnostics and psychoanalytic psychotherapy and works as a psychoanalyst in private practice as well. He is the author of Does the Woman Exist? (1999) and On Being Normal and Other Disorders (2004), which won the Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship, all available from Other Press.

Review:

A major achievement from a major scholar....This book is an outstanding review of the highest quality Lacanian thinking. -- Peter Fonagy, University of London

The kind of book that can have transformational effects....the old ways... are replaced with a fresh new approach. -- PsycCRITIQUES Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, John J. Derbort

This book will become a point of reference for both researchers and clinicians for years to come. -- Rik Loose, DBS School of Arts, Dublin

Verhaeghe creates pathways through the contested field of contemporary clinical diagnosis. The themes of this book are real and urgent. -- Bernard Burgoyne, Middlesex University

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590510895
• ISBN 13: 9781590510896
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528