Making Up Persons

Personhood is alternatively accepted as something that is innate in individuals or subject to processes of attribution that rely on the existence of specific capacities. Taking Ian Hacking's discussion of "dynamic nominalism" as a point of departure, I focus on how the categorization of difference makes "people" into a "person" or not, in relation to the legitimacy of their needs and desires. To explicate, I turn to Lorna Rhodes' Total Confinement and Neely Myers' Recovery's Edge and demonstrate how ideas of personhood's innateness or attributability reify conceptions of need and desire, particularly associated with experiences of mental disorder and psychosis.