BRITO, Alexandre Vieira    CALIMAN, Luciana Vieira. The diagnosis of language and the language of diagnosis: a pragmatic perspective . Psicol. rev. (Belo Horizonte) []. 2017, 23, 3, pp.994-1011. ISSN 1677-1168.  https://doi.org/10.5752/P.1678-9563.2017v23n3p994-1011.

Speech Acts, as theorized by John Austin, presents language from a pragmatic perspective. This means that signs/language take on creative forces and produce realities. Through analytical effort, the purpose of this article is to provide the idea that the language-act and classification are related. For further comprehension, we argue that a classification may not be a neutral description about facts. It is substantially the product and the producer of reality. Among many different ways of classification, the psychiatric diagnosis, as a particular case in the theory of Speech Acts, is on which we will focus. We elaborated a concept – diagnosis act – that combines aspects of the efficacy of the language-act with those of medical diagnosis from its political implications in the social field, when it both come to the production of subjects. In conclusion, a psychiatric diagnosis produces realities from the same properties that speech acts do. Diagnoses produce subjects and so, have existential, political and social effects that can only be analyzed at the particular encounter between diagnoses and diagnosed individuals.

: Language; Pragmatic; Psychiatric diagnosis.

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