DSM-5 Live Action Role Play
Reading Nancy McWilliams Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994), one is struck by just how identifiable are these various character organizations. Her book is meant to be a psychoanalytic version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; as a handbook to be never far from your consulting chair (should you be inclined towards diagnosis). Reading through these nine positions offered here, whether they be hysteric, depressive or schizoid, I am confronted by a continual feeling of insight: it me. This feeling no doubt gives the act of diagnosis its great power: one desires a diagnosis, in part, because one feels seen.
But really we are no great believer in diagnosis, or any archetypal character structure; even Lacan’s tripartite structures of Neurosis, Psychosis, Perversion, so streamlined and neat in its logic, is rather too neat to be credible; it is, as is typical with Lacan, too clever for its own good. We are of the viewpoint that any given human is never statistical and rather more opaque than anything that can be written about them in advance. While acknowledging that there may be patterns of experience, and that the psyche has a discernable structure—because language and metabolism—we must also admit that it is an impossible structure; far from being Lacan’s donut, the topology of psyche is rather more like Pascal’s god: a fearful sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere; very few will admit this.
Anyways, I’ve always read diagnostic categories under the star of genre, namely science fiction/fantasy. I do this mostly because it is hard to take seriously a system of thought that not so long ago categorized homosexuality as a disease. That being said, what I enjoy about the McWilliams handbook is its game-like qualities; it reads to me as if it were a manual for Dungeons and Dragons character types; a pick-and-choose array of dynamic and fantastic characteristics. The DSM-5 live action role playing game then would be structured like DnD, with character sheets, assorted dice, Psychiatric Dungeon Master storyteller and so on. The team of players would roleplay their chosen diagnosis upon the fantasmatic landscape of the 21st century. Under the assumption that normativity does not exist and that the truth of diagnosis is only as useful in-as-much-as it is aesthetic—made out of metaphors—the player must transmit their specific psychical pain into a special sensitivity; a mutant power, if you will, able to act upon self and the world. The goal of this game would be to make sensible the psychoanalytic axiom that the symptom is the cure.
