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Is There a Place for Psychiatric Diagnosis in Family Therapy?
Author(s) -
Gibney Paul
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/j.1467-8438.1990.tb00828.x
Subject(s) - metaphor , family therapy , psychiatric diagnosis , inclusion (mineral) , psychology , project commissioning , medical diagnosis , mental illness , psychotherapist , power (physics) , psychiatry , class (philosophy) , publishing , medicine , social psychology , mental health , epistemology , cognition , philosophy , linguistics , physics , pathology , quantum mechanics , political science , law
In this paper, the process of psychiatric diagnosis is contrasted with the practice of family therapy. The ‘mental illness' metaphor suggested by the acts of diagnosis is critiqued on the grounds that it obscures issues of class, gender and power, that it deletes the clinician's role in the development of diagnoses, and that the overall schemata in it contain serious philosophical and methodological insecurities. It is suggested that, as psychiatric diagnosis seeks to name individual pathology and as family therapy aims at contextual analysis, the two processes belong to different quests. The paper concludes with a discussion urging for the inclusion of the moral‐ethical‐aesthetic domain in both quests.