Reviews for Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

The average rating for Psychoanalytic Diagnosis based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-03 00:00:00 Tracey Savage Starting with the pros of this therapy book, Nancy McWilliams writes with great intelligence about psychoanalytic diagnosis. She breaks down the distinct forms of functioning (e.g., neurotic, borderline, psychotic) and even though I find this form of diagnosis outdated, she makes strong cases for each conceptualization and provides reasonable therapy implications and differential diagnosis commentary. She also considers nuance in her conceptualization and remarks about how other therapeutic orientations view similar phenomena; this openness to other orientations suggests that she cares most about what would benefit clients over sticking to one form of treatment for the sake of it. She included some insights I found personally revelatory and important, such as how we have to mourn relationships we lose or the images of those people take up space in our minds in unhealthful ways, or how children will try to believe themselves as bad to justify why a parent figure would abuse them. I think two areas of this book left me wanting more. First, I found sociocultural awareness lacking in this book in several ways. I wrote down around five to ten examples but just to provide a few: for example, early on in the book she suggests that people trying to change stigmatizing terms is a futile endeavor, such as getting people to stop using the r-word or to stop describing gay people using the f-slur. I found this comment so insensitive and lacking of any nuance for systems of power and how those terms have been used explicitly to oppress marginalized groups, not just to call a phenomenon by a different name. At another point she states that schizoid people are often thin which means that they are removed from their own greed. This statement struck me as offensive because it implies that fat people are greedy, which is fatphobic. Third, she references Freud and hysteria a lot without really naming the sexism Freud enacts. She makes a defense of Freud and argues that Freud actually tried to empower women, and even if her argument possessed some merit, I think naming the damage he has done in regard to pathologizing women and also just the way the term hysteria came about to demean women would have been important. I'm also unsure how I feel about saying that people's personalities are depressive, schizoid, borderline, etc. as opposed to acknowledging that people can have depression, have borderline personality disorder, etc. Basically, I feel like in some ways this form of diagnosis implies that people are their disorders or their mental health diagnoses, which may be stigmatizing, even if some can take comfort in acknowledging what they are dealing with. From my experience working in this field I also felt that people often experience components from each of these overarching personality areas as opposed to falling neatly into one of them. Though McWilliams I think suggests that people may inhabit more than one personality area, the framework she uses in this book may lead to binary conceptualizations of clients if not utilized with nuance. Overall an interesting book that I will take some insights from even though I'm not primarily a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapist. Yay for my first read of 2020 and onto the next.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-11-27 00:00:00 Terry Chase I read this book to learn more about bipolar as I have a friend with this diagnosis. This book was recommended to me by another friend and I was glad I could get my hands on it. Its written in professional language and sometimes it was hard to understand some things, because I'm not a doctor and psychology is just something of an interest of mine. But it answered all my questions. It is a very interesting reading, but be prepared to what you might find out, the author just puts the info out there as this book is meant for professionals. I really liked the way the book is structured. It not only gives you the description of the outer signs of the diagnosis, but it also gives you the idea of inner life of the person with that diagnosis. Scary. After I finished reading about bipolar, I couldn't help myself and read the rest of the book. And then I read it again, this time with a highlighter and markers. A great read. I will definitely be rereading it from time to time. By the way, after reading this book I talked to a friend of mine, who is a practicing psychiatrist, to see if I understood the information right and to my surprise (I did mention its kinda hard to understand some things in the book) everything I read I understood spot on. It didn't make me feel better though as bipolar is a scary diagnosis, but at least now I understand what my friend is going through on daily basis and can if not help, but ease some of his pain or at least make it easier for him to go through what he's going through.