The silent violence of diagnosis.

Diagnosis promises clarity. It delivers a label that substitutes the question. Where there was a subject, now there's disorder.

The silent violence of diagnosis.

The diagnostic manual classifies. In that apparently neutral gesture lies violence. The symbolic interpellation of diagnosis can foreclose subjective experience. Naming a disorder is not innocent: it creates realities, closes possibilities, substitutes the label for the question. Where there was a suffering subject, now there is an administrative category.

The history of psychiatry is marked by segregation. First with racist and colonialist accents; then, induced by pharmacology. It was hoped that naturalizing mental illness as brain dysfunction would end stigma. That hope evaporated. Diagnostic violence persists now with neuroscience pretensions. The brain replaces the subject.

Clinical work must resist the classifying temptation without naively rejecting diagnosis. It is about maintaining the tension: using categories when they orient without allowing them to substitute singular listening. The analysand is never their diagnosis; diagnosis is, at best, a provisional hypothesis that transference disproves.

Psychotherapy

1h

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