PsycCRITIQUES November 14, 2016, Vol. 61, No. 46, Article 1 The Pathologization of Everyday Life: Diagnostic Discourses and Their Looping Effects A review of Diagnostic Cultures: A Cultural Approach to the Pathologization of Modern Life (Classical and Contemporary Social Theory) by Svend Brinkmann New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. 154 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-1319-2. $149.95 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040575 Reviewed by Donald R. Marks, Larissa Redziniak In his influential work The Normal and the Pathological, the French physician and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem (1989) observed that “in the long run, a malaise arises from not being sick in a world where there are sick men” (p. 286). Canguilhem pointed to the ways that distinguishing pathology both made possible and shaped the experience of “normal.” In his latest book Diagnostic Cultures, Svend Brinkmann, author of Psychology as a Moral Science (Brinkmann, 2011) and John Dewey: Science for a Changing World (Brinkmann, 2013), provides a captivating analysis of the ways that use of medical diagnoses to categorize human behavior has altered our inner experience and our everyday social lives. Citing the Vygotskyan psychological theorist Jaan Valsiner (2014), Brinkmann describes his project as “cultural psychology.” He frequently cites a central tenet of that approach: the fallacy of “entification,” in which constructs such as “mind” and “personality” are reified as independent agents. Instead, Brinkmann offers a post- Cartesian perspective in which “mind” is considered as a verb—“an activity or process rather than a static entity” (p. 18) —or, in other words, a set of actions that persons perform. Brinkmann augments this cultural psychology perspective with use of Ian Hacking’s (1995) argument that psychological categories, including psychiatric diagnoses, refer not to natural kinds or essences but to “human kinds.” Unlike natural phenomena, such as chemical properties or planetary movements, human kinds occur only within the context of human institutions and relationships. As Brinkmann notes, one could only be considered a “king” within a world that includes the institution of monarchy, whereas water was H2O before there was a discourse of chemistry. Moreover, Brinkmann highlights Hacking’s contention that human kinds interact with the descriptions applied to them and, in so doing, exert influence on themselves. This phenomenon, which Hacking has dubbed “a looping effect,” refers to the way that human kinds affect their own classification and the behaviors associated with the classification. For example, those who have been classified and described as “schizophrenic” may tend to behave in ways that conform to the descriptions associated with that classification. In addition, those who have been classified may exert influence over the classification by altering their behavior and reshaping the description to include new actions or experiences. Labels such as “mad” or “Asperger’s” may be reappropriated and redeployed to exert new types of social relations and effects that are often destigmatizing or freeing, though such beneficial outcomes do not always result. Quoting Hacking, Brinkmann notes that “when new descriptions become available. . .there are new things to choose to do” (p. 37). It is vital to note that Brinkmann’s analysis of diagnostic cultures does not constitute a facile rejection of psychiatric diagnoses in the manner of Thomas Szasz’s (1974) “myth of mental illness.” To the contrary, Brinkmann argues that human kinds are “just as real as natural kinds.” As he helpfully notes, the recognition that depression is a human kind rather than a natural kind (i.e., that depression is discursively constituted) does not make the condition any less grave for those who suffer with it. He observes that a diagnosis takes on discursive legitimacy as long as three criteria identified by sociologist of science Annemarie Jutel (2011) have been satisfied: (a) the condition is commonly recognized within society as harmful or undesirable, (b) there is a technical capacity to identify the condition (e.g., tests, symptom checklists), and (c) the condition must be assimilable into the culture’s “language of suffering” (i.e., it Page 1 of 5 PsycCRITIQUES: The Pathologization of Everyday Life: Diagnostic Discourses and Thei... 11/30/2016 http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=fulltext.printReview&uid=2016-48094-001&languag...