Ben Morsa
Ben Morsa is a licensed clinical psychologist trained in psychoanalysis and psychological assessment, and the founder of Tide Pools, a group psychology practice in Oakland, California. He has spent nearly fifteen years working at the intersection of psychoanalysis, psychological assessment, and the clinical care of neurodivergent, queer, and transgender patients. His work has been shaped by the persistent questions: what does assessment owe the person receiving it; and what comes after diagnosis? His debut book, Farewell Diagnosis: Diffracting Psychoanalysis, Autism, and Assessment (Bloomsbury, 2026) pursues those questions across psychoanalytic theory, feminist science studies, and the lived reality of clinical practice.
Farewell Diagnosis:
Diffracting Psychoanalysis. Autism, and Assessment
Farewell Diagnosis: Diffracting Autism, Psychoanalysis, and Assessment offers a reimagining of diagnostic practice. Rather than treating diagnosis — clinical or self — as a discovery of truth, Ben proposes that each diagnostic act is an agential cut: a situated gesture that reveals some meanings while obscuring others. Drawing on psychoanalysis, feminist science studies, and lived experience, the book approaches autism and assessment not as problems to be solved, but as entangled processes to be lived with. It engages the tensions between pathologizing logics and affirming frameworks, between open-ended listening and institutional constraint. Ben asks: what comes after diagnosis — not only in systems of care, but in the patient’s internal world? With sensitivity and intellectual rigor, Farewell Diagnosis explores what becomes possible when we suspend the need for diagnostic certainty and attend instead to the sticky, dynamic, and relational terrain of meaning. This is a book for clinicians, assessors, neurodivergent readers, and anyone seeking more spacious ways to think with — rather than through — diagnosis.
