Psychopathology Of Modernity

The development of mass technological culture, urbanisation, mechanisation and alienation from the natural world, coupled with the erosion of smaller social units and an unprecedented increase in mobility, have increased mental illness

McGilchrist argues that the structural conditions of modernity — technological mass culture, urbanisation, and social atomisation — are themselves generators of mental illness, correlated neurologically with left-hemisphere dominance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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A society structured by free-market economics generates enormous material wealth and technical innovation and, at the same time, breaks down every traditional form of social cohesion and belief, creating a kind of dislocation or poverty of the spirit that draws people into addiction

Alexander identifies free-market modernity as the root cause of addiction, arguing that dislocation and spiritual poverty are unavoidable by-products of the economic order rather than defects of individual character.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis

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Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

Han argues that the signature pathologies of modernity — depression and burnout — are produced not by repression but by the compulsive positivity of an achievement society that replaces prohibition with the imperative of unlimited self-optimization.

Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society, 2010thesis

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his psychology as ‘an extreme response to the pluralization of modern society, in which the individual [is] oppressed by the conformity-inducing forces of collective life’ … addressed, not just to the problems of the individual patient, but ‘to the problem of modernity, understood as mass man in a mass society’

Clarke, citing Homans, establishes that Jung’s entire therapeutic project is simultaneously a diagnosis of modernity’s pathological suppression of individuality within mass-collective structures.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994thesis

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Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.

Jung diagnoses the fundamental psychopathology of modernity as the pathological split arising when civilised consciousness is so estranged from instinct that neither repression nor integration remains viable.

Jung, C.G., The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis

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Modernity was marked by a process of social disintegration … led to a breakdown of familiar social orders, and the loss of a sense of belonging, with far-reaching effects on the life of the mind. The advances of scientific materialism … helped to produce what Weber called the disenchanted world.

McGilchrist traces the psychological consequences of modernity — disenchantment, loss of belonging, and mental fragmentation — to the convergent forces of industrial capitalism, scientific materialism, and bureaucratic rationalization.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Stress, burnout, anorexia, bulimia, drugs, heart attack, cancer — are these not the

Sardello catalogs contemporary somatic and psychological symptoms as consequences of modernity’s declaration that the world is dead matter, tracing collective pathology to the desouling of perception itself since the sixteenth century.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis

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Modernity is characterized by fragmentation and loss of a unified center of identity. The center does not hold … and the psyche is experienced as dis-integrated. To survive, psychological dissociation has become essential.

Stein characterises modernity’s signature psychological condition as dissociative fragmentation of the self, reading Picasso’s cubist decomposition of form as the artistic cipher of this collective dis-integration.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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In no previous epoch of human history has the dark side occupied the foreground of attention to such an extent as it does today. The sick, the psychopath and the psychotic … arouse the interest and sympathy of contemporary man as never before.

Neumann reads modernity’s fascination with pathology and its aestheticization of ugliness and dissonance as symptoms of a civilisational transition in which the old ethical order has collapsed without a new one emerging.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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What Sass picks up in modern culture and identifies with schizophrenia may in fact be the over-reliance on the left hemisphere in the West, which I believe has accelerated in the last hundred years.

McGilchrist proposes that the phenomenological parallels Sass draws between schizophrenia and modernist culture reflect an actual neurobiological drift toward left-hemisphere dominance that has pathologised modern Western experience.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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The effect of hyperconsciousness is to produce a flight from the body and from its attendant emotions. Schizophrenics describe an emptying out of meaning … with thought become so abstract as to attain a sort of ineffable vacuity.

McGilchrist links the modern pathology of hyperconsciousness — abstraction, emotional numbing, and devitalisation — to schizophrenic phenomenology, suggesting that the modernist aesthetic of shock was a symptomatic attempt to restore felt reality.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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the external, nonsubjective view of the world now needs to be reworked … social psychiatry too works within the idea of the external world passed to us by Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Kant.

Hillman argues that both mainstream and social psychiatry remain imprisoned within a Cartesian ontology that locates psychopathology in objective determinants, thereby failing to address the subjective suffering of the world itself.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting

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the human race is in danger of being annihilated by the ‘moral insanity’ which has taken possession of it and which is a symptom of a transitional period lacking an ethic.

Neumann diagnoses modernity’s violence and collective possession by evil as symptoms of an ethical vacuum produced by the collapse of the old Judaeo-Christian moral order before a new one has consolidated.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man.

Jung frames the psychopathology of modernity as a structural lag in which moral and psychological development has been outpaced by technological and scientific power, placing civilisation at catastrophic risk.

Jung, C.G., The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957supporting

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men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth … can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war … Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness

Jung insists that modern warfare and mass destruction are ultimately psychic phenomena — products of unconscious forces breaking through a consciousness that has neither recognised nor integrated them.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting

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the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide … questions are addressed to him which primarily concern the most intimate and hidden life of the individual, but which in the last analysis are the direct effects of the Zeitgeist.

Jung argues that modern neurosis and political paranoia share the same psychic mechanism — shadow projection — and that personal symptoms addressed to the therapist are in the final analysis effects of the collective Zeitgeist.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Undiscovered Self, 1957supporting

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his thinking is impoverished and flattened. On the other hand, since emotions cannot be completely killed, they must have their existence totally apart from the intellectual side of the personality; the result is the cheap and insincere sentimentality with which movies and popular songs feed millions of emotion-starved customers.

Fromm diagnoses the modern suppression of authentic emotion as producing a dissociation between intellect and feeling, manifested at the cultural level in the mass consumption of sentimental substitutes.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting

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Twentieth-century American history is the story of four paradoxes of modernity that loomed ever more as contradictions … the very triumphs of rationalization and control seemed to reveal only the final impossibility of any ultimate rationalization and control.

Kurtz reads modernity’s psychopathological trajectory through the paradox that its highest achievements — rationalisation and control — systematically undermine the very sense of agency and coherence they promise to deliver.

Kurtz, Ernest, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010supporting

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modernity has a hard time accepting, even provisionally, that life sometimes is horrible. The attendant denial of chaos only makes its horror worse.

Frank identifies modernity’s pathological commitment to narratives of restitution and cure as producing a systematic denial of chaos that intensifies rather than resolves the suffering it refuses to acknowledge.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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The demonism of Nature, which man had apparently triumphed over, he has unwittingly swallowed into himself and so become the devil’s marionette.

Jung argues that the modern disenchantment of nature does not eliminate its demonic energies but internalises them, producing the mass psychological possession that erupted in twentieth-century totalitarianism and genocide.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting

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pathologizing … ‘the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective’

Hillman’s concept of pathologizing reframes psychological symptom-production as an autonomous psychic activity that requires re-evaluation rather than cure, implicitly challenging the normative assumptions that ground modern psychiatric classification.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside

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As markets extend their reach into society, governments extend their willingness to manipulate social life for the benefit of the economy, whatever the effects may be on psychosocial integration.

Alexander demonstrates how economic globalisation actively dismantles the psychosocial integration necessary for psychological health, treating market expansion as a direct mechanism of collective pathology.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside

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