The profile of a monster: the subjective meaning of diagnosis

Journal title RICERCA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Alberto Lorenzini
Publishing Year 2011 Issue 2011/3 Language Italian
Pages 13 P. 43-55 File size 606 KB
DOI 10.3280/RPR2011-003004
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From a psychoanalytical point of view, a diagnosis of mental disorder represents an ambiguous and paradoxical task. From this vantage point, in fact, the essence of any psychopathology consists in itself in having taken up an external reifying view on one’s interiority. Psychoanalytical treatment should reverse this diagnostic tendency that patients have developed on themselves in order to recover the "subjective meaning" of diagnosis. When this operation succeeds, patients improve not because they can correct their symptoms but because, with the disappearance of the preconditions of symptoms, they can de-concretize them and recover their own selves.

Keywords: Diagnosis, symptom, concretisation, prereflective consciousness, <i>unheimlich</i>, self-acknowledgment

Alberto Lorenzini, L’identikit del mostro: il significato soggettivo della diagnosi in "RICERCA PSICOANALITICA" 3/2011, pp 43-55, DOI: 10.3280/RPR2011-003004