In the Confined Space of Identity

After all, identity is the last remaining resource when there is a dearth of
tools to imagine a different future, when we close our eyes to the possibilities of alteration.
– Francesco Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria (translation by the author)

From academic papers to claims in the form of TikTok or Instagram carousels, the leitmotif of the most recent emancipatory struggles can be defined as the discovery of the “right to define ourselves.” 

This discovery may prove to be crucial, as Chiara Durastanti argues, because «the flip side of the right to define ourselves is the right to forget ourselves¹»: you can forget you belong to a category only if your group was the one that historically defined them. The right to define ourselves – and to use that definition as an emancipatory tool – is the theoretical foundation of Identity Politics, a political approach that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century in the United States, alongside new sociopolitical movements demanding justice for specific groups. This marked the start of a political struggle rooted in the identities – and the unique experiences of discrimination – of oppressed groups.

Identity Politics has since spread everywhere and brought this mode of social claiming based on (self)recognition also in Italy. Movements such as intersectional feminism² are also progressively embracing identity-based claims, proposing a description of individuality as an assemblage of intersections of social identities, such as class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and degree of ability. In mainstream discourse, unfortunately, this intersectionality often remains confined to individual identities and their components, lacking the broader scope of intersectional analysis.

In this intertwining of identity components, we observe the growing influence of psychology and neuropsychology: people increasingly define themselves through symptoms, traits, and diagnoses. Whether through ironic social media formats, blogs sharing serious personal experiences filtered through diagnostic perspectives, books, preachy slogans, or bold text on hats and T-shirts, diagnoses are discussed far more prominently than other areas of psychological science. 

We are certainly in a moment of special interest in these disciplines, which goes hand in hand with the increase in diagnosed mental disorders in recent years³. Even in Italy, although the majority of orientations have historically been psychodynamic and humanistic, the influence of evidence-based approaches that ground their interventions mostly on psychodiagnostic assessments and related international guidelines is certainly a growing trend. It is therefore not surprising, as the number of diagnoses rises and the dissemination of content about various psychopathological conditions grows – ranging from deep insights to shallow stereotypes – that mental health issues have become part of the social discourse, particularly among younger groups who show greater openness to these topics.

The reason why this type of identification is also embraced and widespread in platforms and by minority activists⁴ is easy to identify: people diagnosed with mental conditions are a vulnerable group, and mental health always ranks low on the institutional agenda.

Movements aligned with the grammar of Identity Politics place significant emphasis on discursive practices as a means of “normalizing” certain demands. In this sense, reacting to a given situation involves integrating specific narrative gaps into one’s personal story, presenting one’s “uncomfortable truth” to others – such as a diagnosis – to position oneself as a discursive fragment that, within the chorus of other narratives, helps normalize and, consequently, make acceptable a particular idea.

In this article, I will attempt to analyze the convergence of meanings and motivations that allows Identity Politics and psychodiagnostic language to become singular allies, highlighting some critical questions about this season of political struggle. Importantly, in reference to the ways in which certain discourses emerge from the multiplicity of new forms of social claims, the reflection will be concerned neither with issues within the academy nor with specific movements. 

Research and critique within different approaches to Identity Politics are broad and fruitful, but they do not correspond to their realization into society and common sense. Similarly, the issue of psychological diagnoses has clinical and epistemological implications that exceed the goals of this reflection. The intent of the text is to raise criticality and doubt with respect to how certain influences and themes emerge and produce meanings in the collective discourse when they meet the needs, vulnerabilities, and desires of this Zeitgeist.

An issue about provenance

The explicit motivations for the use of psychological diagnoses as a weapon of vindication mostly refer to the lack of attention institutions pay to mental health and the desire to make the discourse around mental conditions less discriminatory. Talking about one’s diagnosis thus becomes a means of bringing the issue into discourse, making it socially present. The individual takes upon themself the burden of the missing narrative to become the spokesperson for a collective demand. This aspect highlights a system of social critique based on individual experience, validated through what Sonia Kruks⁵ critically terms “epistemology of provenance.” The latter is the result of an undue simplification of the crucial issue of how the origins and context of experiences influence the formation of knowledge. When the legitimization of a statement is reduced to the validation of the statement’s origin (e.g., ‘what women say about women is necessarily true’), an epistemology of provenance is being adopted. In this context, the risk of such an epistemology is that radicalizes the individualism of feeling and suffering, making individual actors the sole custodians of an experience of suffering or discrimination that can only be confirmed and operationalized⁶ by them.

Compared to other approaches, the theoretical foundations of Identity Politics have spread more extensively in the mainstream infosphere because they align with the individualism of neoliberal culture and provide a palliative yet convincing response to the widespread craving for self-reference, multiplying claims and spokespersons.

Mark Fisher sought to explain how stress, depression, and anxiety are medicalized expressions of the individual’s distress in an existential context governed by the competition and resignation inherent in capitalist realism:

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak)⁷.

David Smail, a psychologist who has sought to integrate a deeper awareness of societal material conditions into his practice, observes that «[t]he majority of psychotherapies place little theoretical emphasis on the need for people to confront those material structures in the outside world that have contributed to making their lives a misery»⁸. This is curious, given that psychoeducational interventions – on affectivity, emotionality, and specific conditions – are central to many therapies. Yet, the social and immediate pressures that, while not always causing, at least exacerbate the unsustainability of individuals’ lives, are often ignored. The fear of politicizing the discipline results in a significant naiveté about the material and pathological aspects of mental suffering, frequently countered by an overemphasis on nosographic-descriptive and neurocognitive details.

This resection of the political leads to an essentialist view of mental suffering, defined as all internal to the subject, constitutively and culpably their own. It is this ease of reducing subjective experience that makes Identity Politics the perfect vehicle for spreading discourse on diagnoses, which, in turn, provide a ready-made and already wounded identity. A suffering identity in need of redemption, but more importantly, of attention, understanding, and validation.

Miseries of Identity

Identity Politics places great emphasis on the power of language to reshape our thinking and open up new meanings for the identities of the marginalized. However, if the narrow scope of these discourses fails to interrogate the power structures it risks falling into new forms of hierarchization and, in this specific case, losing control over mechanisms initially designed as emancipatory. 

Recent identity claims have been easily absorbed by the economic system, and this absorption is not accidental but, in a sense, explicitly sought: the demand for greater media representation of marginalized groups has been promptly granted – at least to those who could afford it, who have finally been included into the “discourse” – and giants like Netflix have built much of their image and capital around the concept of inclusivity.

The flip side of the demand for representation is commodification. This is evident: identity consumerism pins us all to online stores; a t-shirt advocating our cause, or even a piece of locally sourced furniture because we’re eco-friendly, even if we never stop shopping. We can’t go to the supermarket, or pharmacy, or watch a movie without being sold a piece of identity. Everything around us seems to say, “You exist! And this is exactly who you are! Talk about it, because this is the missing piece in the world’s puzzle.” The identity market is this trade in illusions for which we often express gratitude: thank you for recognizing us, thank you for these trinkets that show everyone who we are.

For anthropologist Francesco Remotti⁹ identity is alluring because it allows us to define ourselves and others within a hierarchy of power that can be legitimized as natural and a-historical. This applies to both cultures and individuals: we must not forget the separation that precedes every identity creation, even though identity itself serves to facilitate this forgetting. It helps us forget the choices, the arbitrariness, and the winding path that leads us to be the precarious assemblage we are in the here and now, and that we will no longer be: the vulnerability of this shell.

The frantic recourse to these stable identifications and the identity-driven use of diagnoses respond to a fundamental need: the desire to feel justified even when different, to avoid bearing the responsibility – that we feel like guilt – for what is lacking or divergent. Identity Politics wields the concept of identity and the essential experience it supposedly entails as an emancipatory tool – yet this concept is so easily assimilated by existing mechanisms of dominance that the risk of merely replacing dominant groups with the more privileged among the different minorities, without radically dismantling the conditions that make oppression systemic is very real.

Old and new hierarchies

This risk emerges emblematically by turning our thoughts to the diagnoses that are most embraced by the narratives presented as emancipatory and normalizing. There is not as much talk about schizophrenia, psychosis, borderline, and narcissistic personality disorders as there is about diagnoses of depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, neurodivergence, or learning disabilities. In fact, there are diagnoses, such as narcissistic personality disorder, that are used in a discriminatory way¹⁰ even in progressive circles, and which are very seldom disclosed. 

After all, to define oneself publicly, not all diagnoses are equally valid, and this drive for disclosure is dictated not only by the drive for “normalization of mental illness” that serves as the slogan for the claims, but also by a certain control of the self-narrative enacted by individuals. Diagnoses that have historically been most segregated still tend to be hushed and hidden, and new diagnoses have risen to the role of undesirables.

The discussion will then focus on diagnoses that are more self-exonerating, comprehensible, and capable of eliciting empathy and understanding, or on those that, with the prefix “neuro,” can claim the status of a biological “issue” – one that is not arbitrary, outside the realm of choice. It is nature that has willed it, not the murky, culpable quagmire of subjective existence. This control of the narrative pertains not only to the revelation of diagnoses but to any form of personal pain narrative. Where does this aestheticization of suffering end, and what new hierarchies does it create? While we hoped to create spaces to discuss suffering and difference, we have inadvertently endorsed old hierarchies and established new ones. This precise control of the narrative reveals the idea of mental suffering as guilt and a moral problem that the epistemology of provenance sought to conceal. On the other hand, as Judith Butler writes, the subject is

[o]bligated to seek confirmation of its own existence in categories, definitions and names created by others, the subject seeks traces of its existence outside itself, in a discourse that is, simultaneously, dominant and indifferent. Social categories represent a sign of submission, as well as of existence¹¹.

This submission is particularly apparent in the logic employed by Identity Politics toward missed recognitions. The aim is to showcase the suffering and vulnerability of minority experiences in hopes of eliciting empathy, attention, and even guilt. If this does not occur, the identity of the opponents is redefined: the focus shifts from problematic behaviors, attitudes, or viewpoints to the people themselves. The grammar of social conflict in the age of Identity Politics is Manichean, and it can only be merciless. It fails to break away from a form of external validation that closely resembles the parent-child dynamic, thus revealing both the lingering sense of perceived subordination and the complexity of reframing emancipatory claims within a deeply paternalistic culture.

To overcome a perceived sense of deficiency, individuals project it onto others, thereby perpetuating the delegitimizing rhetorics of shame and guilt. These rhetorics, possibly mirroring a certain prescriptivism rooted in Catholicism, have effectively maintained the status quo. Consequently, social criticism fails in its primary aim: to create new narratives of legitimacy and deficiency that do not simply replicate the hegemonic rhetorics it seeks to overcome.

Wendy Brown contends that identity politics traces its origins to liberal capitalism. This system inevitably perpetuates the very “wounded attachments” it seeks to overcome: «[i]n its demand for recognition of its history of suffering, a politicized identity can become invested in its pain and subordinated status, seeking not so much freedom from these, but an institutionalized acknowledgment of them¹²». Identity politics is upheld by hierarchical categories defined through opposition, heavily tied to the pain, trauma, and wounds imposed by society. This identification with the wound demands a certain performativity of pain and an aestheticization of suffering. From this perspective, it becomes clear why it can be appealing to identify oneself through a diagnosis – though not just any diagnosis  – that confines suffering and difference within a neat, well-defined categorization suited to storytelling.

The master’s tools

The history of psychological diagnoses is a complex one, marked by a highly uneven path that remains the subject of ongoing research and debate. Uncritically accepting psychodiagnostic¹³ realism to legitimize certain claims is therefore far more than a mere epistemological issue: it is a political and existential problem, one that exposes our rooted inability to legitimize differences, to confront the other, and to develop practices of self-legitimation beyond those shaped by the passive and manipulative dynamics of victimhood.

Postcolonial studies and feminist epistemology have shown that the progress of knowledge takes place within social determinants that steer it in a non-neutral and often discriminatory¹⁴ direction. They demonstrate that a critical stance toward the institutions that produce and operate with “truth” is a necessary aspect of social struggle. Recent history has placed the issue of belief in science at the center of public discourse in such a polarized manner that it has created a poor environment for this critique. However, science is not something to be “believed in,” as it is not a religion; rather, it is something we rely on – and precisely because we rely on it, we, as a collective¹⁵, must supervise it. This also applies to psychology and psychiatry: it is of little use to secure public funding for therapy if most specialists are unprepared or discriminatory toward the minorities who access it¹⁶, or if the categories they employ are shaped by biases against certain groups of the population¹⁷ or shaped by capitalist realism.

If minority subjects are defined as such because their identity has been shaped and differentiated by dominant classes, can we reclaim that identity without questioning how it is tied to their subordinate origins? The issue here is not so much the – albeit critically important – Lordean argument¹⁸ about the impossibility of waging social struggle using the master’s tools. According to Robert Chapman¹⁹, a philosopher and activist focused on neurodivergence, since diagnoses are born in society and only later categorized by experts in roundtable discussions, reclaiming these categorizations is far more effective than hoping they will stop being misused from above. No change happens in a categorical and discursive void.

What can become problematic is using these tools without radically questioning their ties to structures of domination and the vulnerability that draws us toward certain forms of palliative submission. To challenge the content of a diagnosis may mean renouncing the legitimacy of the diagnosis itself, and thus the identificatory relief it provides to the individual and the community. But diagnosis cannot fully detach from the vertical power dynamics in which they are embedded: it requires someone to confer it, and even in the case of self-diagnosis – an emancipatory practice used, for example, within certain autistic communities – it still relies on a series of epistemic authorities and institutions that validate it from above. Failing to take seriously the underlying vulnerability that makes even mental disorder diagnoses more appealing than the symbolic void in which people feel they are drowning means engaging in a battle that, at its core, is already at the stage of surrender.

Conclusion – Inadequate

The realm of legitimation becomes crucial when political struggle turns into discourse, as it serves as a key to unlocking new possibilities for recognition. However, I have argued that if, in order to legitimize these new narratives, we employ concepts without carefully monitoring the power dynamics that made them possible, we risk infusing those vulnerabilities into social movements and political struggles. Moreover, because engaging in politics solely through discourse inevitably involves a continuous effort to legitimize marginalized voices, it becomes evident that this process risks occurring through methods readily available within the status quo – such as an uncritical trust in scientific neutrality or lingering in victimizing, guilt-inducing narratives that locate the justification for claims within the individual and their wounded experience. Faced with this risk, it is worth asking why so much energy is concentrated on the linguistic-narrative level and its presumed ability, on its own, to liberate identities.

I don’t believe that reclaiming psychological diagnoses is impossible, provided that the critique of them is radical and that their interconnection with old and new power dynamics is rigorously examined, not only within academic circles but also within social movements and in society at large. On the other hand, it is also important to consider when it is necessary to use diagnoses as an emancipatory tool, how much to indulge in the mechanics of subordinate absolution they enact, and how much these self-explanatory categories are cannibalizing our ability to experience our feelings in ways other than those allowed by the grammar of medical language, based on adequacy or inadequacy to the existing social structures.

On an individual level, the sentiment we need to interrogate is precisely that relief we feel when we use a diagnosis or terms like “functioning” and “depression,” because those words seem to carry the power of a truth confirmed by others. As if to feel was never enough, as if there were no possibility of understanding and translation through relationships, but only the extremes of acceptance and annihilation. In this relief resides all the defeat, the evidence that years of abusive discursive practices have truly convinced us that we are lacking and that we don’t know how to respond to this supposed or real lack except by seeking immediate external absolution – wherever it may come from – before retreating to the towers of our secure identities. We want to be able to say: “We were born this way, there is no choice or arbitrariness, we can only be this inadequate thing we present to you.” Addressing this issue with honesty reveals a fundamental mistrust in changing social dynamics that would not only provide individual relief but also result in a concrete change in living conditions. We think we can act on behaviors but not on consciences, on the immediacy of statements but not on the temporality of relationships between us. We want everything ready, a label that already says who we are and what we want, and we want it to be mandatory for others to know.

The need to ground claims within the confines of an unquestionable way of being reveals a deep mistrust in the ability to act on the horizontal level of relationships and desires, a preemptive surrender to the inherent conflict in difference and its transformative possibilities. The Invisible Committee writes that for an insurrection to work – i.e., to prevent the return of what it fought against – it is essential to dismantle both authority and the need for authority²⁰. Given that insurrection is not imminent and we must rely on long-term processes, let us make a provisional commitment, hoping that we remember our presence here and that this does not become a missed opportunity: we will take responsibility for our differences and, through their encounter, forge supportive collectivities.

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Giulia Bergamaschi ([email protected]) is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Bologna. She mainly writes about the relationship between psychological sciences and public discourse, and feminist social epistemology applied to psychiatry.

1. C. Durastanti, Traduzioni, impegno e identità, [on-line] in: Internazionale, published in 26 march 2021 [consulted on 18 september 2024].
2. P. Hill Collins, S. Bilge, Intersectionality, Cambridge, Polity 2016.
3.  See:https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-health-adults
4. In the different and more or less criticizable meanings that this term has taken on recently, with the spread of forms of dissemination, advocacy and awareness raising that are also, and perhaps especially, located on social platforms.
5. S. Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2001.
6. When I speak of “performed suffering,” I do not mean inauthentic suffering: genuine suffering is also performed, in the sense that, as Austin argues, every communicative act is performative. The sincerity of difficulties is never the subject of this analysis.
7. M. Fisher, Good for nothing [on-line] in: The Occupied Times, published on March 19, 2014 [February 8, 2022].
8. D. Smail, The origin of unhappiness. A new understanding of personal distress, Harper Collins, New York 1993, translation by the author.
9.  F. Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria. Laterza, Roma-Bari 2010.
10.  The case of narcissistic personality disorder is particularly interesting because it is often used (even on progressive platforms and circles) to talk about abusive relationships and to instruct women on how to break these types of relationships. This creates a perception that causally links narcissism and abuse, which, in addition to being unsupported by research (not all narcissists abuse, not all abuse is done by narcissists) shifts the discourse from the systemic issue-abuse-to the categorical issue. Narcissism for men, like borderline disorder for women, is a condition that shows a large gender bias in diagnosis, as you can read about here: W. Braamhorst, J. Lobbestael, W.H. Emons, A. Arntz, C.L.Witteman, M.H. Bekker. Sex Bias in Classifying Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2015 Oct;203(10):804-8. This could mean, as many feminists have suggested for borderline disorder (See: C. Shaw & G. Proctor, Women at the Margins: A Critique of the Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder.” Feminism and Psychology, 2005,15(4): 483-490.), che queste condizioni vadano indagate in termini più ecologici e meno riduzionistici.
11. J. Butler, The pychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1997
12. W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995.
13. In this sense, it is important to emphasize that psychodiagnostic realism, that is, the claim that diagnoses accurately replicate universally and essentially existing conditions, is more a belief of naive psychology than a theoretical assumption of the discipline, whereby diagnosis is a synthetic form of clinical knowledge useful for making predictions about the future evolution of the picture and establishing the specific treatments most likely to succeed.
14.  See: for postcolonial studies: W.D. Mignolo. (2009) Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society.;26(7-8):159-181; For feminist epistemology: D. Haraway, Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14 (3), 575–599, 1998.
15. I am taking here a widespread perspective among sociologists of science, for whom this need is fundamental to the whole citizenry, in the words of Heather Douglas: «The need for contexts in which citizens can constructively debate scientifically-informed policy-making has never been greater. We need forums in which values relevant to these decisions can become clarified». H. Douglas, (2006). Inserting the Public Into Science. 10.1007/1-4020-3754-6_9.
16. S.N. Rees, M. Crowe, S. Harris. (2021). The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities mental health care needs and experiences of mental health services: an integrative review of qualitative studies. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 28(4), 578-589.
17. We can think about the history of the diagnosis of hysteria, or the “North African syndrome” analyzed by Frantz Fanon in: Le Syndrome nord-africain (1952).
18. A. Lorde. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007.
19. R. Chapman, Will opposing psychiatric labels stop over-medicalisation? [online] in: Psychology Today, published October 12, 2020 [February 8, 2022].
20. Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. MIT Press, Massachusetts 2009.