For Therapy, a New Guide with a Touch of Personality

The New York Times Book Review
A great new was published at begin of the last year, is truth, is old, but it is an important new for the psychologists too. Because more of them has been practiced the psychology under, for a lot of them calls, a superficial paradigm based on just symtomatology.
The encyclopedia of mental disorders known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is built on a principle that many therapists find simplistic: that people's symptoms are the most reliable way to classify their mental troubles.
The manual, called the D.S.M., does not speculate about internal thoughts or
unconscious assumptions, which researchers say are all but impossible to scientifically
standardize.
The result, many psychotherapists believe, is a document that is comprehensive but shallow, ultimately too superficial to capture the complexity of human motivation, the depth of emotional pain
Now, in an effort to provide more of this context, a coalition of organizations representing psychoanalytically oriented therapists has produced a diagnostic manual of its own. Unlike most psychiatrists, psychoanalysts focus their efforts on understanding the meaning and the psychological roots of mental suffering, rather than on diagnosing mental disorders and treating them with drugs or less intensive methods of talk therapy.
The new guidebook, unveiled Saturday at the annual meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association is modeled on the standard diagnostic manual in its format and its title, the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. But it emphasizes the importance of individual personality patterns, like masochistic, dependent or depressive types, which are found in many people but which qualify as full-blown disorders only at the extremes.

bye!