The minds of all human beings are inherently incompetent, gross, and amoral. This is somewhat akin to the early view of Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory wherein it is assumed that all humans have the same kinds of primordial or animal impulses that regrettably become difficult for them to manage in the context of being citizens of civilization, but that can become more manageable in the context of acknowledgment and therapeutic connection. However, in Diagnosis Theory, while the palimpsests of the experts superior knowledge (and assumedly, the patient’s inferior knowledge) and position of tragic pessimism toward the human remain, lost is any attachment to cultural humility or the kinds of valuing of creativity and autonomy implied within practices such as free association. Diagnosis Theory avoids cultural humility because, in its ideas of itself, it is entirely uncultural. This allows the global exportation of its assumptions on the part of its adherents without reminding themselves of earlier imperialists. It also is of a piece with its pessimistic view of human minds: the very material of culture is the interaction of human minds in all of their ideal and unideal, moral and immoral states. Objective truth, existing at a level higher than a human mind, can seem to be arrived at for the Diagnosis Theorist by simply running away from culture and its contaminating elements. While good and bad and moral reality do not exist, an exception may be made for competence, which is thought to be something that either objectively exists within a person, or does not.
Next: Tenet 3 – Medical truth supersedes and subsumes moral truth and is inherently flexible
Or, explore the opposite: Tenet 2 – Human minds are inherently intelligent, good, and competent
Misdiagnosed Anonymous 