Discussed in this essay: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. American Psychiatric Association. 886 pages. $59.96 cloth; $45 paper.

Has there ever been a task more futile than the attempt to encompass, in the work of a single lifetime, let alone in a single work, the whole of human experience? For roughly five thousand years, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and cranks have incinerated untold quantities of olive oil, beeswax, and fossil fuel in pursuit of this maddeningly elusive goal; all have failed, sometimes heroically. Not even Shakespeare could manage it; closer to our own times, Dickens, a sentimental…