TAXONOMIC SCHEMA DISORDER

....................................... by Stanley

.....What the hell is that?
.....And well you may wonder.
.....It was the ironic label given to a well known and respected literary critic who tried to divide literature into ultimate categories: comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. The term really comes from classifying things in biology – but the compulsion to classify (Taxonomic Schema Disorder) is a very widespread intellectual illness.
.....Jung suffered from it quite badly: there had to be four ego functions, eight psychological types, and four stages of eroticism – not three or five – FOUR !!
.....In the bible there are seven deadly sins – how come there are not eight? By what feat of intellectual perspicacity do we arrive at just that number?
.....In astrology there are four elements – in physics there seem to be quite a few more. Searching the internet I find Stages of Life are quite popular. Two, twelve and three stages are favourites and are each announced by their proponents with magisterial precision and certainty.
.....Descartes said there were two fundamental substances in the universe: mind and matter – and we’ve been stuck with that ever since. The Catholic Church tells us there are three conditions of life after death: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
.....All though the Middle Ages they believed that everything above the moon was Godlike, pure, perfect and divine and everything below the moon, including all earthly things, was demonic, foul and corrupt.
.....There is no end to the compulsion to classify.
.....Transactional Analysis tells us we have three internal parts, The Parent, The Adult and The Child... Oh, sorry, we’ve found two more subdivisions. The parent is now either Nurturing or Controlling and The Child either Adapted or Free. Of course, one could probably further classify different types of ‘Free Child’ such as Free Wild and Free Reasonable. And no doubt there are different types of Free Wild.
.....Steven R.Covey found Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Ken Wilber found four ‘quadrants’ to explain human beings.
.....The Myers-Brigg Type Indicator is based on Jung’s Psychological Types. It tells us there are 16 personality types measured by a person’s preferences, using four basic scales with opposite poles. The four scales are: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving. The various combinations of these preferences result in the 16 personality types. It is understood that no matter what your preferences, your behavior will still sometimes indicate the contrasting behavior of the opposite pole. Thus, no behavior can ever be used to falsify the type, and any behavior can be used to verify it.
.....Then there are ways of taxonomically categorising the emotions. Did you know there are 22 negative emotions on self-worth; 14 negative emotions on control; 24 negative emotions on love; 17 negative emotions regarding justice; 14 negative emotions on safety; and 6 negative emotions on trust?
.....And now we come to the Granddaddy of them all: the DSM IV (The Psychiatric Bible). The rationale is based on imaginary classifications. If you can describe a set of symptoms, then you can name a disease. There are always a certain arbitrary NUMBER of symptoms that make up a disease or disorder. The exact number of symptoms required to constitute a disorder is decided by a majority decision of the DSM committee – (a procedure unique in the annals of science). So, for example, the so-called ‘Factitious Disorder’ DSM-IV-TR specifies THREE criteria for factitious disorder:
1. The patient is intentionally producing or pretending to have physical or psychological symptoms or signs of illness.
2 The patient's motivation is to assume the role of a sick person.
3 There are no external motives (as in malingering) that explain the
behaviour.
The patient has to have all three symptoms – not two of them or one – to be diagnosed as suffering from Factitious Disorder.
.....There actually should be one further criterion; only this one should be about the psychiatrist not the patient:
4 That the psychiatrist really knows the patient is
‘pretending’ and that he really does know what the patient’s
motivation is.
.....Now, once we have named and established the disease, we can then claim it exists as a distinct ‘entity’ and that the patient has it. Where we go from there is anybody’s guess.
But I guarantee that Taxonomic Schema Disorder will never be on the DSM list because that is precisely what it suffers from.

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Note: I am indebted to William Deresiewicz who described the famous literary critic Northop Frye as having an ‘excessive attachment to taxonomic schemas’.

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