Diseases of Society

The issue of “diseases” or social pathologies is part of the established forms of modern societies’ self-understanding. To refer to the social side of pathologies implies however an approach that goes beyond the addition of individual diseases only. By linking individual symptoms to collective processes, the psychoanalytical approaches of Freud and Mitscherlich think the “diseases of society” in terms of failures in the major functions of social reproduction. An alternative approach is to identify social pathologies as false realization of basic normative standards that society has given to itself in its fundamental ethical convictions. If this disorder in the individual or collective subject’s relationship to themselves is pathological, we can speak of “social pathologies” when different functional worlds, far from being organically articulated, collide in a way that restricts social freedom.