On Being Normal and Other Disorders

'A major achievement from a major scholar...This book is an outstanding review of the highest quality of Lacanian thinking.' - Peter Fonagy, University of London. 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 is Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Ghent in Belgium and is also in private practice. He is the author of 'Love in a Time of Loneliness' (1999) and 'Does the Woman Exist?' (1999).

Paul Verhaeghe's critical evaluation of the contemporary DSM-diagnostic shows that the lack of reference to an d 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, psyc