No diagnosis

I am sure I have seen many clients whose diagnosis I could never discern, who I'd say in an "official" way had no diagnosis. Some I worked with for months, some for years. These clients fit no categories except for a baseline of depression, which I believe exists in practically every human being on earth. Here are some recent examples:

Is Mack, the CPA, depressed or is he alexithymic? He knows he has no empathy (except maybe "crisis empathy") for human beings but gets very sad if an animal is hurt or abandoned. Does Allen, the young adult I've worked with for three years, have Asperger's, birth trauma, dysthymia or catastrophic depression buoyed by intellect? Is Maverick's nearly-invisible autism embedded with Antisocial Personality? Should there be a name for autism fused with Complacent Personality Disorder and somatic anxiety, all grounded in childhood serial trauma perped by a Witch Borderline mother? Is Dar, sales executive, an Antisocial Personality or a complex trauma victim with a "deformation of character" that resembles sociopathy? She steals and cries, cares and lies. Wealthy Julia is a Sphinx. Highest functioning, a Martha Stewart-quality bountiful and involved mother, enmeshed and selfless, regressed and terraformed by her solipsistic mother's pure entitlement. Does teen Julio, fey and wan as a leaf skeleton in the breeze, have anxiety, or has his parents' indifference made his gayness so passive? Elderly bodyworker Staci dims and tints all of her feelings and emotions with self-help literature platitudes that layered upon the normative insanity of her childhood escapism, to where she may never fully land on reality. Each session, she unleashes one flowing hour-long paragraph with no awareness of Prolix. Diagnosis: Blind child in a woman's body? Lamar, 16, has a global cynical view of "all friendships" except the girls whose affection he craves like cocaine and a teddy bear. He is as rich and wry as an adult, vastly overestimates his talents, acts unruly and explains it like a pundit. Personality disordered already? Or just realistically reactive to his mother's poisonous immaturity and contempt? Is Daniel a selectively Avoidant Personality, or is he socially anxious, or developmentally out-of-sync and thereby uncomfortable with human beings?

The point is that these people are welcome, rich fields of exploration because we are not limited to "disorders." They don't conform to them because they are too complex and hidden, because their true diagnosis, Enigma, has hegemony over any label. We may listen to their stories for weeks or months while each session ends with another question mark. We come to know in time, possibly, the main qualities of their nature. There is one fact that joins them all: They need to know their origins and weep out their pain.