On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics » (1st Edition)

Paul Verhaeghe

Paul Verhaeghe is senior professor at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and head of the Department for Psychoanalysis and Counseling Psychology. He teaches clinical psychodiagnostics and psychoanalytic psychotherapy and works as a psychoanalyst in private practice as well. He is the author of Does the Woman Exist? (1999) and On Being Normal and Other Disorders (2004), which won the Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship, all available from Other Press.

Psychodynamic testing methods are productive only when they are applied from within the framework of a determining metapsychological theory, says Verhaeghe (psychoanalysis, U. of Ghent, Belgium), so he emphasizes the theory. He begins by arguing that a categorizing diagnostic based on atheoretical observation is doomed to fail. Then he develops the theoretical ground needed, and analyzes the various possible differential diagnostic relationships occurring between subjects and the Other. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR