READ THE LABEL

How psychiatric diagnoses create identities.

- MANVIR SINGH

To name something-to separate Tit from the rest of existence and bestow a label on it is a foundational act. It is the beginning of understanding and control. In Genesis, the first thing God did after splitting light from darkness was to call the light "day" and the darkness "night." After Adam was created and let loose in the Garden of Eden, his original job was human label-maker. God brought him creatures "to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name."

If Adam was like most people, he probably set about attaching names to "natural kinds"-groupings seemingly dictated by inherent features of the natural world. Referring to a group of animals as "pigs," he would have assumed that the critters so designated all shared properties that differentiated them from every other non-pig animal. Psychologists say that we intuitively treat categorical distinctions-whether among fruits, emotions, or ethnic groups-as if (in Plato's famous metaphor) they carved nature at its joints.