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To say that Haugsgjerd's book is a 416-page catalogue of psychoanalytic contributions to psychiatry, mostly drawn from Kleinian (W. R. Bion and D. Meltzer) or Lacanian sources would be a little unfair, but not untrue. The final pages comprise a list of more than 500 names of authors mentioned in the text and several of them are quoted or mentioned many times, so there is hardly any page on which he isn't referring to at least two or three authors.
The catalogue entries are so arranged that they form a history of ideas and lines of progress of concepts from the end of the 19th century (Freud) to the present. It is Haugsgjerd's version of how the psychoanalytic paradigm developed and widened its scope to include still more pathological personalities. In the process of writing, he has of course chosen from among various possibilities. What strikes me is that he ends up with the patient as an isolated being seen from the outside. This alienation effect might be a consequence of his efforts to turn psychoanalysis into a system covering all psychiatric issues. One finds, however, that few of the authors paid much attention to the mutuality of the psychoanalytic process. Kleinians have a tendency to think that “things” are put into them by their patients. It might also be due to the fact that Haugsgjerd focusses on suffering, which is of course an attribute of the patient. His theme is that any pathology can be understood as the adaptation to mental pain.
On page 25 (Reitzels edition), Haugsgjerd writes that diagnoses are certain cognitive categories, i.e., cognitive constructs, created for certain purposes, meeting the demand to distinguish forms of suffering with some feature in common. This is accomplished by applying a conceptual filter