ABSTRACT
In “Who is afraid of DSM?” The place of the subject in the society of therapy, René Rasmussen explores the practices of controlling the subject in today’s society. The prevalent logic of evaluation, he argues, demands effectiveness and flexibility. The measuring of the subject in terms of numbers presupposes transparency. Not only is the subject controlled from without, the author argues, it is also demanded that he or she should be able to know, understand and explain him-or herself completely. The logic of the evaluation society has resulted in the growth of certain therapeutic approaches: NLP, cognitive therapy, coaching, motivational interviewing, and positive psychology. Often intimately connected with the workplace, these therapies help the subject adapt to organisational changes and the increased expectations of effectiveness and flexibility. Evaluation, to Jacques Lacan (2004), represents the Other, and the subject does not know what the Other of evaluation wants of him or her. The state of anxiety confronts the subject with the Real in Lacan’s understanding, unbearable and impossible to understand. Evaluation, as a constantly ongoing examination, induces the possibility of constant anxiety. Cognitive therapy or coaching, it is argued, do not work at the level of the divided subject, but at the level of the ego and superego. They are there to ensure that everyone can
realise the demands of effectiveness, flexibility, and transparency. Such therapies constitute adaptations to a given social reality, to the cognitive capitalism of our time. The subject must even be treated by such therapies to avoid their very effects. When these therapies demand of the subject that he or she thinks positively, they also tell him or her that thinking negatively or being stressed constitutes illness. Thus these therapy forms are variants of the superego, cruel instances in the unconscious telling the subject what to do or not to do. Cognitive therapy or coaching excludes the social bond of the subject. Because they disregard the social context, these therapies merely adapt the subject, or rather part of the subject, the ego and the superego, to the social context. They thus constitute uncritical adaptation to the given social setting. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), following Allan V. Horwitz (2002), works according to a simple idea, inspired by positivist behaviourism. If the subject’s behaviour is not appropriate in a given social context, it is dysfunctional behaviour, assumed to be caused by an internal dysfunction, a biological or cognitive disease. The subject suffering from anxiety must thus either take anti-anxiety-medication or receive cognitive therapy to help him or her change wrong cognitive or emotional schemas to correct ones. From a psychoanalytic point of view, whether a given symptom, drugs use, or a given affect is good or a bad for the subject depends on the context and on the uniqueness of the subject’s structure in terms of neurosis, perversion, and psychosis. The internal of the subject manifests itself as an Other with its own desire and demands. The DSM is a discourse telling the subject that his or her incontrollable internal system, the biological or the cognitive inner self, goes its own way if it has been ill for too long. Like in Kierkegaard’s account of Abraham walking speechless in the desert (Lacan, 2004), we all walk in the desert of an unknown internal self, and do not know whether it will spare us, as God did with Abraham, or whether we will have to pay, as Abraham and Isaac were thought to. The author argues that depression can be seen as a way of escaping capitalist discourse and the objects of the capitalist market. From a psychoanalytic point of view it is also a way of escaping evaluations and social superego therapies. It constitutes an attempt to neutralise anxiety, although it does not help the subject to find a solution (Corvi, 2010). Suicide can be seen as another way of “avoiding” anxiety, especially if there is too much of it; not a real defence of the subject, it is rather a radical change of it into nothing. Capitalist discourse, which counts money and numbers
as the universal signifier, and science, which acts as if everything can be measured, as if knowledge can be understood as a totality, exclude the position of the subject. In counting human resources and measuring human performance, the divided subject, which is not a virtual totality, is excluded. Hence, science promoting evaluation, the author argues, is a kind of death-drive.
