On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics

Winner of the 2005 Goethe Award in Psychoanalytic Scholarship

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's critical evaluation of th…