Against the Psychiatrization of Subjectivity: When Diagnostic Language Becomes a Simulacrum

Monday, March 24, 2025

In a society that demands readability, predictability, and compliance, subjectivity becomes a threat. The response? Classify it, diagnose it, reduce it. What cannot be quantified must be explained away. What cannot be explained must be pathologized.

This is the terrain where psychological and psychiatric jargon now thrives — not as a science of care, but as a language of containment. Terms like “narcissistic personality disorder,” “trust issues,” or “avoidant attachment style” are not benign descriptors. They are codes—modules of meaning that flatten the individual into consumable narratives. They simulate understanding without engaging in it. They assign labels in place of confronting the raw, wild, often contradictory essence of a human being.

These diagnostic tags operate as simulacra, in the Baudrillardian sense: they replace the real with a performance of reality. They are not attempts to engage with the lived complexity of human interiority, but tools of ideological governance, cloaked in the aesthetics of scientific neutrality.

What happens when we tell someone they have “trust issues”? We are not engaging with their history, their betrayals, their survival strategies. We are not asking: What has the world done to you to make you distrustful? We are implying that their emotional defense is a defect, a dysfunction to be corrected. It is a linguistic operation of delegitimization, often aimed at women, queers, and other dissident subjectivities who refuse the normative relational script.

Attachment styles — secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized — present themselves as revelatory, when in fact they are tools of domestication. They attempt to explain how people love in the language of pathology. But love cannot be neatly categorized. Neither can grief. Neither can rage, or solitude, or ambivalence. These are not symptoms. They are states of being. They are testimonies of experience, not malfunctions.

Worse still, these models are often internalized. People start to speak about themselves in the terms that have been used to diagnose them. I have commitment issues. I’m an empath. I attract narcissists. Identity becomes a self-fulfilling algorithm, scripted in therapeutic jargon. This is not healing — it is social control in soft focus.

The psychiatrization of subjectivity has become a bureaucratic apparatus of neoliberalism. It is not interested in transformation. It is interested in management. In productivity. In making the individual legible, accountable, compliant. The goal is not emancipation, but stabilization — keeping the chaos of subjectivity from spilling into systems of profit, hierarchy, and order.

But some of us are not meant to be stabilized. Some of us do not need to be decoded. Some of us refuse to be reduced.

To reclaim our subjectivity, we must disarm the language that seeks to disembody it. We must reject the premise that deviation from normativity is a disease. We must stop demanding “functionality” as proof of health. We must learn to live in opaque complexity, in flux, in contradiction — not as a pathology, but as a radical form of being.

This is not a call to abolish all psychology. It is a call to liberate the psyche from diagnostic violence. To return to what the soul has always known: that it cannot be charted on a clinical map. That it is not a problem to be solved. That it is sovereign.