“Reason is emotion’s slave and exists to rationalize emotional experience” (Bion
1970, p. 1). One of the most distinguished theoreticians and clinicians in the history of psychoanalysis thus launches his text,
Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psychoanalysis and Groups. In that text, Bion attempts to rationally organize the emotional and cognitional data of human experience and its disorders into clinically useful insights. Today, almost 50 years later another laudable attempt at this aim, although in a different métier, can be found in the
Diagnostic Manual-Intellectual Disabilities: A Textbook of Diagnoses of Mental Disorders in Persons with Intellectual Disabilities (DM-ID). This most recent effort to make sense out of the behaviors of persons with complex, and oftentimes undecipherable, mental functioning stands as a significant contemporary contribution to this daunting challenge. DM-ID has emerged as a guide to clinical practice, a reference work, and an educational tool. …
