Abstract
The classical psychiatric diagnostics—from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century—is a diagnostics of realism. Psychopathology is observed, recorded, organized, and presented as a set of things out there in the world that the psychiatrist is making note of. The existence of the observations is not called into question, the status of the psychiatrist as author or creator of a system is essentially not called into question, and the assumption is clearly that the diagnostic system is a type of accurate representation of the world. A simple way of organizing these diverse literary developments is to note that in all these cases, the representation of reality is called into question, the simple straightforward representations of reality no longer seem to function as clearly. There is some type of recognition of a more complicated reality out there, one requiring a very different literary form to represent it with.