ABSTRACT
The epistemologist Ian Hacking considers that the "fatal flaw" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) project stems from this point of departure which has never been put in question and which remains unexamined within the system. The DSM's "atheoretical" classification was to prove to be increasingly based on a theory of statistics. Open opposition from the former architects of the DSM-III and IV to the orientations chosen by the DSM-5 Task Force culminated, as of 2009, in a series of open letters and complaints to the ruling bodies of the American Psychological Association. The impasse of the DSM project is culminating in the evacuation of "clinical types" in favour of chimeras that drift off into the empyrean of calculus. In Europe, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the situation is characterised by a certain silence from university academics who have generally fallen in step behind the DSM without making their presence felt.
