THE DICTIONARY OF DISORDER.

In the mid-nineteen-forties, Robert Spitzer, a mathematically minded boy of fifteen, began weekly sessions of Reichian psychotherapy. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a student of Sigmund Freud who, among other things, had marketed a device that he called the orgone accumulator--an iron appliance, the size of a telephone booth, that he claimed could both enhance sexual powers and cure cancer. Spitzer had asked his parents for permission to try Reichian analysis, but his parents had refused--they thought it was a sham--and so he decided to go to the sessions in secret. He paid five dollars a week to a therapist on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young man willing to talk frankly about the single most compelling issue Spitzer had yet encountered: women. Spitzer found this methodical approach to the enigma of attraction both soothing and invigorating. The real draw of the therapy, however, was that it greatly reduced Spitzer's anxieties about his troubled family life: his mother was a "professional patient" who cried continuously, and his father was cold and remote. Spitzer, unfortunately, had inherited his mother's unruly inner life and his father's repressed affect; though he often found himself overpowered by emotion, he was somehow unable to express his feelings. The sessions helped him, as he says, "become alive," and he always looked back on them with fondness. It was this experience that confirmed what would become his guiding principle: the best way to master the wilderness of emotion was through systematic study and analysis.

Robert Spitzer isn't widely known outside the field of mental health, but he is, without question, one of the most influential psychiatrists of the twentieth century. It was Spitzer who took the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--the official listing of all mental diseases recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.)--and established it as a scientific instrument of enormous power. Because insurance companies now require a DSM diagnosis for reimbursement, the manual is mandatory for any mental-health professional seeking compensation. It's also used by the court system to help determine insanity, by social-services agencies, schools, prisons, governments, and, occasionally, as a plot device on "The Sopranos." This magnitude of cultural authority, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although the DSM was first published in 1952 and a second edition (DSM-II) came out in 1968, early versions of the document were largely ignored. Spitzer began work on the third version (DSM-III) in 1974, when the manual was a spiral-bound paperback of a hundred and fifty pages. It provided cursory descriptions of about a hundred mental disorders, and was sold primarily to large state mental institutions, for three dollars and fifty cents. Under Spitzer's direction--which lasted through the DSM-III, published in 1980, and the DSM-IIIR ("R" for "revision"), published in 1987--both the girth of the DSM and its stature substantially increased. It is now nine hundred pages, defines close to three hundred mental illnesses, and sells hundreds of thousands of copies, at eighty-three dollars each. But a mere description of the physical evolution of the DSM doesn't fully capture what Spitzer was able to accomplish. In the course of defining more than a hundred mental diseases, he not only revolutionized the practice of psychiatry but also gave people all over the United States a new language with which to interpret their daily experiences and tame the anarchy of their emotional lives.

The Biometrics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center is situated in an imposing neo-Gothic building on West 168th Street. I met Spitzer in the lobby, a sparsely decorated and strangely silent place that doesn't seem to get much use. Spitzer, a tall, thin man with well-cut clothes and a light step, was brought up on the Upper West Side. He is in his seventies but seems much younger; his graying hair is dyed a deep shade of brown. He has worked at Columbia for more than forty years, and his office is filled with the debris of decades. Calligraphed certificates with seals of red and gold cover the walls, and his desk is overwhelmed by paper.

Spitzer first came to the university as a resident and student at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, after graduating from N.Y.U. School of Medicine in 1957. He had had a brilliant medical-school career, publishing in professional journals a series of well-received papers about childhood schizophrenia and reading disabilities. He had also established himself outside the academy, by helping to discredit his erstwhile hero Reich. In addition to his weekly sessions on the Lower East Side, the teen-age Spitzer had persuaded another Reichian doctor to give him free access to an orgone accumulator, and he spent many hours sitting hopefully on the booth's tiny stool, absorbing healing orgone energy, to no obvious avail. In time, he became disillusioned, and in college he wrote a paper critical of the therapy, which was consulted by the Food and Drug Administration when they later prosecuted Reich for fraud.

At Columbia Psychoanalytic, however, Spitzer's career faltered. Psychoanalysis was too abstract, too theoretical, and somehow his patients rarely seemed to improve. "I was always unsure that I was being helpful, and I was uncomfortable with not knowing what to do with their messiness," he told me. "I don't ...