The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization

Kieran Keohane, Anders Petersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317015635
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization explores the nature of contemporary malaises, diseases, illnesses and psychosomatic syndromes, examining the manner in which they are related to cultural pathologies of the social body. Multi-disciplinary in approach, the book is concerned with questions of how these conditions are not only manifest at the level of individual patients' bodies, but also how the social 'bodies politic' are related to the hegemony of reductive biomedical and individual-psychologistic perspectives. Rejecting a reductive, biomedical and individualistic diagnosis of contemporary problems of health and well-being, The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization contends that many such problems are to be understood in the light of radical changes in social structures and institutions, extending to deep crises in our civilization as a whole. Rather than considering such conditions in isolation - both from one another and from broader contexts - this book argues that health and well-being are not just located at the level of the individual body, the integral human person, or even collective social bodies; rather, they encompass the health of humanity as a whole and our relationship with Nature. A ground-breaking analysis of social malaise and the health of civilization, this book will be of interest to scholars of sociology, social theory, social psychology, philosophy and anthropology.

Part I Social Pathologies: Addressing the Question

1 The Notion of Social Pathology: A Case Study of Narcissus in American Society¹

¹ This chapter is based on Ehrenberg (2010).

Alain Ehrenberg

DOI: 10.4324/9781315552774-2

The aim of this chapter is to elaborate the notion of social pathology. The idea underlying the adjunction of the adjective “social” to the substantive “pathology” is that mental pathologies are the product of our social relationships, that they reveal something about our mores and our lifestyles, and that there is a moral, social, and political lesson to be drawn from this type of pathology. At the end of the nineteenth century, neurasthenia inaugurated the tradition of social pathology: it was the first illness of modern life. Today, this topic is related to the widespread—and very confusing—idea in the social sciences and philosophy that there is a double process of psychologization resulting from a weakening of social links, and of a decline of public man in favor of private man. Partisans of this idea mainly claim that genuine society is what used to be. Sociology, in my opinion, has to go beyond this causal explanation. This notion raises the tricky issue of the relationships between changes in symptoms and personality, and changes in social norms and values.

To try to clarify the notion, I’ll focus on the basis on which this widespread idea has been elaborated since the 1970s. This basis is made up with pathologies coming from British and American psychoanalysis: narcissistic and borderline pathologies. They belong to the category of “character neurosis.” These neuroses are characterized by a disorganization of the personality, and notably self-esteem problems, which didn't exist in “traditional” neurosis, the so-called transference neurosis, that is hysteria, phobia, and obsession, and by anxieties of loss rather than of conflict. In transference neurosis, it is both the superego and the conflict between what is allowed and what is forbidden which are at stake; in character neurosis, it is both the ideal ego and loss which are the problem. Today, psychoanalysts deem that most contemporary patients belong to the second category. They tend to think that they address less a therapy of the repressed, the one of transference neurosis, than one of the ideal, the one of character neurosis. In this shift from transference to character, depression has played a major role, but I want to address a parallel issue.

On the basis of this class of neurosis, two American sociologists, Richard Sennett in 1974 with The Fall of Public Man and Christopher Lasch in 1979 with The Culture of Narcissism, successfully launched the idea that the individual has become narcissistic. This psychoanalytic notion has been successfully accepted as a sociological concept: a wide moral, social, and political consensus has been shaped to claim that Narcissus has replaced Œdipus. Sennett and Lasch raised a question on the basis of these pathologies: are we facing a transformation of individualism, which is turning against both society and the individual himself? I will approach this sociological transfiguration of the psychoanalytic notion of narcissism in the American context at two levels, sociological and epistemological.

At the sociological level, I consider it as a narrative, which shows tensions specific to American individualism. The issue is less the truth or mistake of this narrative than its success. It seems to me that its success in America lies in its anchoring into a style of rhetoric that the historian of American literature Sacvan Bercovitch called “The American Jeremiad” in a book published with this title in 1978. The term is descriptive: it designates the political sermons by Puritan ministers of New England in the seventeenth century which “joined lament and celebration in reaffirming America's mission.” The Jeremiad is characterized as follows: a recall of ideal norms of the past; a condemnation of the current state of the community; and a prophetic view announcing that the gap between past and present will be filled in by a punishment sent by God, which is a correction. They made up an American ritual “designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity.” On the other hand, at the epistemological level, as a tool for sociological analysis, I’ll criticize this narrative because it is an individualistic sociology, that is a sociology which is trapped in the opposition between the individual and society, and obsessed by a feeling of decline and of social dissolution, and not a sociology of individualism, which goes beyond this opposition. To summarize my point: the fear of social dissolution is a common idea in our society, it is a social idea; the sociologist has to describe and analyze this fear, as a feature of our society, and has to go beyond it, as a sociology of individualism.

Elements on American Individualism

Its specificity lies in a category that symbolizes the American way: the self. Before being a philosophical or psychological concept, the self is a specifically American anthropological category, at least if one compares the US and France where there no such thing as a self, a category whose origins are social. It is a collective representation, a common idea in American society. This concept is of the greatest social value. It is an expression of a way of living in common through which is represented the automotivated individual who is a fundamental common value of the American society. It harks back to the Puritan origins of America, continues on to the Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century

Romanticism, notably with its major figurehead, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The American individual's first duty is toward society, as it was previously toward his God, whereas in France, it is society, through the state, which has obligations of protection toward the individual—the state being the expression of solidarity of society to any individual. Of course, the self is not considered alone, as an isolated entity; it is intertwined in a cluster of related concepts: self-reliance, which means trust in oneself and independence; self-government, which designates the interdependent pairing of individual and community; it also refers to another pair of key values: achievement, which has its source in Puritanism, and equality, which results from the democratic nature of society, and which is conceived of in terms of opportunity. We French people value an equality conceived of in terms of protection. Opportunity is not highly valued; it is in the same situation as protection is in the US: a secondary value. America and France are like reversed mirror images.

The self, then, is not something inside the individual, but the interface between impersonal and personal (Bercovitch 1975); it is the common, what is shared between us. The self is the motor of this restless activity noticed by Tocqueville, and the crisis of the self is a permanent feature of American history. This goes back to the Puritan foundation in which the strain on the self is a permanent ordeal faced with the double predestination: elected or doomed? To soothe this strain, believers found in the “exemplary biographies” a scene for their dilemma and of their resolution. In Auto-Machia (1607), a popular piece of poetry of Puritan literature, George Goodwin wrote: “I sing my SELF; my Civil Wars [sic] within” (Bercovitch 1978: 13). This “narcissistic liebestod,” as Bercovitch put it, is a swaying between fall and redemption. We will later again find this swaying in the tensions between “individualism” and “community,” or between private and public happiness.

In the eighteenth century, doctrine evolved thanks to Methodism which added an affective and cheerful element to Puritanism_ the authentic convert could take advantage of his life on earth, and this gave rise to what Max Weber called “a culture of affectivity” (Weber 2003: 241). In the nineteenth century, American Romantics used the tradition of the exemplary biographies in a new literary genre: the American autobiography. They celebrated their own self as a representative of America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of them, merged romantic naturalism with Puritan hermeneutics in an idea of the American self in which the personal and the common are intertwined. The relationship between the individual and America is as direct as the relationship between the believer and his God. I didn't refer to the mortal narcissism of the Puritans by chance, because Sennett and Lasch have inherited this topic.

The Encounter between Psychoanalysis and Sociology

The transformation of narcissism into a sociological concept results from the encounter between the main trend of American psychoanalysis, the Ego–Psychology school, and the exploration of the American character, the brand name of American social sciences since David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, published in 1950. Two recurrent topics used to criticize transformations of individualism until today first appear in this seminal book: “personalization” and “privatization.” This encounter appears in a social context which I will specify further.

In the US, contrary to France, psychoanalysis has been introduced in the context of a global interest in psychology, a psychology that has been invested with hopes of enhancement of personal ability to connect with others successfully. For instance, Freud raised so much interest among American scholars that The American Journal of Sociology devoted a whole issue to his work in 1939, the year of his death. Another feature of American psychoanalysis and of the relationships between psychoanalysis and sociology in the US is the role played by the Frankfurt chool, the Culture and Personality School, and, more generally, by Culturalism. The issue of “personality” is a major topic of American social sciences. This was not the case in France, where the French sociological school considered the notion of “personality” and collective psychology suspiciously. In a speech given before the French Society of Psychology in 1924, Marcel Mauss considered that collective psychology described the group spirit without the description of the group itself. He called it “the contentious discipline” (Mauss 1968: 296).

The key moment unfolded between the 1930s, with the work of Eric Fromm and Karen Horney, and 1950, the year The Lonely Crowd was published. It has been the biggest commercial success of American sociology until today, and Riesman was the first social scientist to be on the cover page of Time Magazine after the paperback publication in 1953. His book was explicitly founded on a hypothesis formulated by Fromm. The Frankfurt School, The Culture and Personality School, etc. are contributions, among many others, to the American way of representing common life on the basis of the self-motivated individual. The concept of collective personality has opened a space of exchange between psychoanalysis and sociology, actually a space that is a sort of a division of labor: psychoanalysis being about individual psychology and sociology about collective psychology.

Following the publication of The Lonely Crowd, numerous studies on the American Character and its changes were published. At the same time, several books by psychoanalysts popularized the idea that the character or the personality of the patient had changed. Childhood and Society, by Erik Erikson (1950) or The Quest for Identity, by Allen Wheelis (1958) described new patients that were no longer subject to the same type of neurotic disorder than those of Freud's time. They suffer from identity disorders, from disorders of self-image, that is, pathologies where social and moral ideals of the individual are core symptoms. Often, these patients don't show clear symptoms, but rather a vague and permanent malaise.

Here, I have to emphasize the social role played by character neurosis: this notion rendered psychoanalysis less strange, because everybody could recognize common social types through it. With this sort of neurosis, as Karl Abraham wrote in 1925:

Psychoanalysts henceforth could not only speak of conflicts related to sexuality, but also of character psychology easily recognizable in daily life in striking descriptive terms. Organized around character and identity, psychoanalysis could enter in public space more easily.

(Abraham 1965: 253)

The evolution of ideas in psychoanalysis, on individual personality, and in sociology, on collective personality, lead to an epistemological and moral alliance between the two disciplines. The consequence is that both issues of changes in the normal and the pathological individual are elaborated interdependently. This shaped the “American Jeremiad” narrative of the last third of the twentieth century. The changes in psychopathology that appeared in borderline and narcissistic patients were the staple on which a moral, social, and political criticism has been built about certain trends in American society. Psychoanalysis has been used as a means of information on what is going on in individual reality. It has been utilized in that way because it runs deep into the self-conscious self, into this personality which is valued from the outside, but which is collapsed, psychologically speaking. It shows the disintegration of the self when the pursuit of private happiness and the pursuit of public happiness follow different or opposite paths, betraying the American ideals.

In 2000, an American political scientist from Harvard, Robert Putnam, gathered an abundant corpus of quantitative studies allowing the synthesis of trends in terms of strengths and weaknesses of social links. Bowling Alone, a worldwide success, empirically showed the following:

For the first two-thirds of the century, a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago – silently, without warning – that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

(Putnam 2000: 27)

During the 1960s and the 1970s, American individualism entered into a crisis which expresses itself in a split between private and public happiness. This has given rise to abundant literature and huge media buzz through two topics: psychotherapy considered as a worldview, and a new character of social life, the narcissistic individual.

This encounter between psychoanalysis and sociology happened in a context that I will characterize by two features: the first is what can be termed as the end of a liberal cycle, which had started with Roosevelt with the development of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: ADDRESSING THE QUESTION
• PART II SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: CONTEMPORARY MALAISES
• PART III SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES: BIOPOWER, SUBJECTIFICATION AND CIVILIZATION
• Index