Vittorio Lingiardi on the Necessary ‘Torment’ of Clinical Diagnosis

I hope that diagnosis will be no longer considered a “dirty word” (quoting Nancy McWilliams), or a bureaucratic or devalued act. Rather, it is an engaging and challenging process that can bring us back to the original, ancient meaning of the word diagnosis: “knowing through.” Through the patient, dialogue, and relationship.

The diagnostic process has no simple, easily applied formula. In his General Psychopathology (1913), Karl Jaspers claims that “Every diagnostic schema must remain a tiresome problem for the scientist” (Alle Diagnosenschemata müssen für den Forscher eine Qual Bleiben). In the original quote, the German word Qual is used where “tiresome” has been used here; Qual literally means “torment,” and in fact I think that for researchers and clinicians diagnosis should be a “torment.”

There is always a tension between the need to connect a patient to a general category and, at the same time, to connect the patient to [their] unique qualities — “the impossible science of the unique being,” as Roland Barthes would say.

from Featured Author – Vittorio Lingiardi. (2017, December). Guilford Press.