Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Commentary on the <em>Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd Edition</em>: The PDM-2 as an effort to enhance the psychiatric diagnosis.

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The author views the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd edition (PDM-2) as a monumental and very difficult achievement. Freud divided psychoanalysis into three parts: a model of the mind, a clinical treatment, and a research tool. Two of these parts have held up remarkably well, while the third is yet to be developed. If Kant and Freud were alive today, the author thinks they would agree that the task on which the PDM-2 embarked is the toughest task possible. It involves a noble effort to capture what is possible to reduce to numbers, what is possible to study scientifically in a field that is inherently almost impossible to study. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts (an observation wrongly attributed to Einstein but brilliant anyway). The PDM-2 effort is to delineate a variety of different phenomena that one hears about every day that are almost impossible to count. But because they count so much, it is important to find ways of counting them, ways of being able to judge the phenomena we see based not simply on our own subjectivity but via measures that trained people could apply reliably. The author sees the natural audience of the PDM-2 as researchers more than clinicians. Even educators might feel that it is more for researchers. And that narrows the audience a great deal because there are so few psychoanalytic researchers. So the author would take the simplest and most clinically relevant parts and make them into an instrument that would be easier for clinicians to use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)