ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the historical background in an attempt to discover the object of clinical psychodiagnostics and to see how it came into being. It examines the relation between psychodiagnostic designations and clinical reality from a wider perspective, namely, how science conceives of the relationship between words and things. The chapter shows the underlying reason for psychodiagnostic categorization: its epistemology contains a structurally determined impotence that makes it impossible to arrive at a definitive solution in this field. Psychoanalytic interpretations of psychiatric entities are ubiquitous. Psychoanalysis has doubtless instated a knowledge, albeit one that is unable to be used within the clinic to the extent that the latter operates under the Master's discourse. The chapter concludes that one cannot avoid making ethical choices, and that the object of psychodiagnostics is first and foremost a relation rather than an object per se.
