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From Deviation to Disorder: the medicalization of sexuality in contemporary psychiatric classifications of disease
In the final decades of the 20th century, the psychiatric field witnessed an important transformation. The psycho-social view of mental disorders, characterized in part by the hegemony of psychoanalytic interpretation and by a political and social critique of traditional psychiatric practices, gave way to a view that was strictly biological.
A landmark in this transformation was the publication in 1980 of the third version of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) by the American Psychiatric Association. But this shift in the understanding of mental disorders — from psycho-sociological to biological — was not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it was part of a larger process of the “re-biologization” of topics and debates, such as race and sexual difference, which were earlier reserved to the realm of political struggle.
[... ... ...]
The fragmentation and specification of disorders of “normal” sexuality are part of this broader process, which points to the very objectification and fragmentation of the “self, “subject” and “person” concepts.
In the final decades of the 20th century, the psychiatric field witnessed an important transformation. The psycho-social view of mental disorders, characterized in part by the hegemony of psychoanalytic interpretation and by a political and social critique of traditional psychiatric practices, gave way to a view that was strictly biological.
A landmark in this transformation was the publication in 1980 of the third version of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) by the American Psychiatric Association. But this shift in the understanding of mental disorders — from psycho-sociological to biological — was not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it was part of a larger process of the “re-biologization” of topics and debates, such as race and sexual difference, which were earlier reserved to the realm of political struggle.
[... ... ...]
The fragmentation and specification of disorders of “normal” sexuality are part of this broader process, which points to the very objectification and fragmentation of the “self, “subject” and “person” concepts.