Abstract
Coupled with exploratory behavior, the desire to understand and to classify the things in one’s environment appears to be an inherent human trait. The word iagnosis itself comes from the Greek words dia, meaning apart, and gnosis, meaning to know, thus promoting the idea that to know or understand a condition one must be able to discriminate it from other conditions. The twentieth century psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) postulated that the essence of the beginnings of knowledge in humans begins with the dual abilities of assimilating observations into existing categories and accommodating information that does not fit into existing categories by creating new ones (Piaget, 1932). The earliest roots of the diagnosis and classification of abnormal behavior, no doubt, stretch back into the very dawn of human consciousness and the rise of societal behavior. Acculturation processes and their evolutionary advantages over solitary existence probably served as a major impetus for the necessity of humans to decide who was capable of following the rules of society, who might be excused from them (perhaps the very young or very old), and who would not. For example, the contemporary Inuit North Americans describe, in their own language, a kind of antisocial personality disordered individual as “his mind knows what to do but he does not do it” (Murphy, 1976). In this introductory chapter, the major issues regarding the diagnosis and classification of abnormal behavior are analyzed. We first discuss the purposes of diagnosis and then provide a historical overview of diagnosis and classification. Next, we describe the current classification system and conclude with a discussion of criticisms and limitations of diagnosis and classification.
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Segal, D.L., Coolidge, F.L. (2001). Diagnosis and Classification. In: Hersen, M., Van Hasselt, V.B. (eds) Advanced Abnormal Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8497-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8497-5_1
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