Clinical sociology between social disease and sociological disease

Abstract

This essay's aim is to explore the potential for relieving suffering with which clinical sociology can provide social actors. The author carries out a theoretical reflection of culture's function in human societies. Culture is an instrument for social actors, to give a meaning to what is happening at each moment. If culture does not grant an effective interpretation of reality, phenomena of disease can arise. This can happen for many different reasons, such as incoherent cultural representations or conflicts between different cultural issues. The paper outlines the kinds of cultural disease that can occur, as well as the possible causes of each. It also sets a link between cultural disease and the contemporary, general lack of cognitive references, due to historical changes – such as globalization – that have been happening too fast to be fully accepted by all.

Keywords:

• culture
• disease
• globalization
• post-modernity

Notes

1. See also Berger and Luckmann (1971, p. 66).

2. More than any other issue, it is important to outline that all individuals learn a language, which is a cultural interpretation of reality.

3. Sociological theory has often focused on the relationship between the culture and the other dimensions of social reality (Weber 1969).

4. Corsale (2000, p. 141).

5. Sparti (1996, p. 108 on).

6. This idea is very similar to Schein's theory of basic assumptions, i.e. a set of metaphysical assumptions that orientate the leadership in the organizations, and that lie in the actors’ unconsciousness. See Schein (1992).

7. This is the limit of a vision of the world based upon one principle of explanation, such as economy, religion, etc.; those principles have been the pivot for political or social ideologies that explain everything according to those principles. See Weber (1969, p. 81). Watzlawick states the same, when he talks about the ‘terrible simplifications’ (Watzlawick et al. 1974, p. 40) as a result of a rationalism, which implies not accepting the complexity of the world and the impossibility of explaining everything. See also Morin (1990, pp. 94–96).

8. See Eisenstadt (1999).