Diffracting Autism, Psychoanalysis, and Assessment
Ben Morsa is a licensed clinical psychologist trained in psychoanalysis and psychological assessment, writing at the edge where diagnosis ends and the person begins.
What comes after diagnosis?
For nearly fifteen years, Ben Morsa has worked at the intersection of psychoanalysis, psychological assessment, and the clinical care of neurodivergent, queer, and transgender patients. His writing grows directly out of that practice, driven by two persistent questions: what does assessment owe the person receiving it, and what comes after diagnosis?
He is the founder of Tide Pools, a group psychology practice in the Bay Area built around rigorous, psychoanalytically informed care that attends to the whole person rather than the label.
Farewell, Diagnosis
Diffracting Psychoanalysis, Autism, and Assessment
A psychoanalytic inquiry into what diagnosis reveals and what it forecloses. Taking psychoanalysis as both method and object of critique, the book argues that diagnosis can be a floor for someone to find their footing, and also a ceiling. Breaking through it means saying farewell to diagnosis as the full story.
The arguments Farewell, Diagnosis is built on
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When people seek or embrace a diagnosis, they are doing something meaningful: finding language for experiences that had none. Dismissing this as fad or social contagion misses the point.
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A diagnosis can be liberatory, even an epiphany. It can also overshadow, confine, and foreclose. Even affirmation, however laudable, risks closing off the patient’s need to know more.
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A good interpretation is not a verdict. The analyst has to be wrong in the right ways, so the patient can correct it, revise it, and take authorship of their own story.
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Nature and nurture, the material and the social, science and activism are entangled. That entanglement is not license to say they don’t matter. It is an invitation to ask harder questions.