a sort of pidgin English

The concept of diagnosis is contingent on the concept of disease. Diagnosis is the name of a disease, just as, say, violet is the name of a flower. For example, the term "diabetes" names a type of abnormal glucose metabolism. ... Diseases (lesions) are facts of nature, whereas diagnoses (words) are artifacts constructed by human beings.
  ... Names, semanticists love to remind us, are not things. Manipulating things is difficult, sometimes impossible. Manipulating names is easy. We do it all the time. Violet may be the name of a flower, a color, a woman, or a street. Similarly a disease-sounding term may be the name of a pathological lesion or bodily malfunction, or the name of the malfunction of a car, computer, or economic system, or the behavior of an individual or a group. ... We cannot distinguish between the literal and metaphorical uses of the term "disease" unless we identify its root meaning, agree that it is the literal meaning of the word, and treat all other uses of it as figures of speech. In conformity with traditional practice, I take the root meaning of disease to be a bodily lesion, understood to include not only structural malfunctions but also deviations from normal physiology, such as elevated blood pressure or lowered white cell count. If we accept this definition, then the term "diagnosis," used literally, refers to and is the name of a disease, and used metaphorically, refers to and is the name of a nondisease.
  ... Historically, scientific medicine is based on the postmortem examination of the body. Recalling his early work as a neurologist, Freud proudly reminisced: "The fame of my diagnoses and their post-mortem confirmation brought me an influx of American physicians, to whom I lectured upon the patients in my department in a sort of pidgin-English." In scientific medicine, the pathological diagnosis always trumps the clinical diagnosis.
  The use of diagnostic terms becomes problematic when the conditions they name are not disease but merely subjective, unverifiable complaints, referable to an individual's body, behaviors, or thoughts (communications). Psychopathology is diagnosed by finding unwanted behaviors in persons or by attributing such behaviors to them. For example, the term "kleptomania" is both a phenomenon and a name; diagnosis and disease are one and the same. Once "named," the diagnosis of a mental illness validates its own disease status. Psychopathology, unlike organic pathology, can change with the nosology—changing the name can convert disease into nondisease and vice versa (for example, homosexuality into civil right, smoking into nicotine dependence). Mental diseases are, a fortiori, diagnoses, not diseases.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:28-30)

the throne of the mind

What determines the question a scientist pursues? One side in the so-called science wars holds that the investigation of nature is a purely objective pursuit, walled off from the influence of the surrounding society and culture by built-in safeguards, such as the demand that scientific results be replicable and the requirement that scientific theories accord with nature. The gravitational force of a Marxist, in other words, is identical to the gravitational force of a fascist. Or, more starkly, if you're looking for proof that science is not a social construct, as so-called science critics contend, just step out the window and see whether the theory of gravity is a mere figment of a scientist's imagination.
  That the findings of science are firmly grounded in empiricism is clear. But the questions of science are another matter. For the questions one might ask of nature are, for all intents and purposes, without end. Although the methods of science today may be largely objective, the choice of what question to ask is not. This is not a shortcoming, much less a fault, of science. It is, rather, a reflection of the necessary fact that science is, at bottom, a human endeavor. Running through both psychiatry and neuroscience is a theme that seemed deeply disturbing to me almost from the moment I began reading in the field ... when my conviction that the inner working of the mind was the only mystery worth pursuing made me vow to become a psychiatrist. What disturbed me was the idea that free will died with Freud—or even earlier, with the materialism of the triumphant scientific revolution. Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that the will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of the brain does not exist.

Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain (2003: 7-8)