de Bilbao, Fabienne <br/><br/>
Diagnosis as a symptom 

 -  2019.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 30 
<br/><br/> The currently dominant positivist dogma is that Alzheimer's disease is an organic disease. However, the unreliable diagnostic processes and the repeated failures to find effective treatments prompt us to question the hegemony of this dogma. This is all the more urgent as mass screenings are now being organized to make early diagnoses. It would be hypocritical here to flippantly say that being diagnosed is always for the good of the patient. According to Foucault’s theory on the circularity of knowledge and power, the diagnosis discourse possesses power effects that produce clinical effects. These effects produce knowledge that in turn reinforces this power. It is a discourse that creates the favourable conditions to make real what it asserts. Hidden beneath a right-minded rationality, this power-knowledge, whereby we guess the deadly impact, takes on the appearance of sacrifice: that of the unconscious subject. It is an active partner of repression. This is why we consider the act of diagnosis to be the symptom of the clinician.