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ABSTRACT
This article seeks to problematize the issue of pathology and to render it intelligible. I elucidate a cultural-political model of a) why pathology is prevalent in numerous forms and social domains, and b) interventions for ameliorating widespread pathology, and ultimately eradicating it. This model draws on the work of Eric Fromm that articulates how pathology is characteristic of normal social, psychological activity in many or most societies. This article also discusses two ways in which prevalent pathology is misunderstood, and not corrected, eradicated, or prevented. One misinterpretation is the standard biomedical model of pathology. A second misinterpretation is a liberal, humanistic, postmodern position that denies all pathology and insists that behavior is a positive expression of choice and agency, which must be validated and accepted rather than corrected.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on Contributor
Carl Ratner, PhD, specializes in cultural psychology, or the manner in which macro cultural factors organize human psychology. He has written on the psychology of oppression. Among his books and papers are: “Psychological Competencies According to Macro Cultural Psychology” (in Chinese, 2014); Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ratner has worked and lived in China where he was a visiting professor at Peking University.
Notes
1 A conscious exaggeration of essential features that are synthesized into an internally unified and logically rigorous concept. Ideal type is not an “average type” that summarizes or classifies elements common to an empirical phenomenon.
2 This biomedical model of psychopathy was the basis of psychiatry that was founded by the physician Pinel in 1809. He attributed psychopathy to excess passion in individuals that led to their inability to control their behavior. Mental disturbance was thus rooted in a weak self that needed to be strengthened in order to control its passion. Freud’s notions of id and ego also continued this emphasis on individual weakness and strengthening self-control—which is a bourgeois, individualistic notion.
3 Liberals condemned Arendt for proposing that Eichmann was a case of banal, or normal, pathology. They felt this did not capture the monstruousness of his crimes. They wanted his acts portrayed as extra-ordinary evil committed by a deranged demon. These critics did not understand that normalizing individual crimes actually reveals their monstruousness because they are committed by so many normal people. Individualizing anti-social behavior actually trivializes it as a random aberration.
11 See https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/free-markets-vs-family-inequality-right-wing-hypocrisy.
12 For additional information about the same issue, see CNN News (December 5, 2015).
13 For more information of the same issue, see Akil et al. (Citation2010) and Joseph and Ratner (Citation2012).
14 A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that drugs widely prescribed to treat severe post-traumatic stress symptoms for veterans are no more effective than placebos and come with serious side effects, including weight gain and fatigue. Anti-depressive and anti-psychotic drugs are ineffective. After six months of treatment with Risperdal, 123 veterans with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) were doing no better than a similar group of 124 veterans, who were given a placebo. About 5% in both groups recovered, and 10% to 20% reported at least some improvement, based on standardized measures (Carey Citation2011). Research on medication and all kinds of mental illnesses comes to the same conclusion (Angell Citation2011a, Citation2011b). Whitaker (Citation2011) reports that anti-psychotic drugs are associated with increased prevalence of mental disorders! Mental illness has tripled over the past two decades despite an exponential rise in psychiatric medicating. Patients who take anti-psychotic medication have poorer recovery rates than patients who do not. Yet the use of these medications has risen exponentially (Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2011, “Psychiatric Drug Use Increases”).
17 This is actually a tenet of Taoism-Confucianism: the ideal ruler does not need to rely on the force of punitive laws to maintain social order, because the society’s institutions are so well-ordered that the parts are functioning in harmony and the people are themselves virtuous.
19 H. S. Sullivan complained that psychiatrists “have found for themselves a useful function in sheltering society from those whom it has destroyed” (quoted in Cushman Citation1994, 817).
20 For pathologizing anger, see Yang (Citation2016).
22 Edward Snowden construed the NSA (National Security Agency)’s surveillance state as anomalous to and antithetical to (outside) American values. His goal was to restore that benevolent normalcy by exposing and correcting this aberration. In fact, surveillance is fundamental to pathological normalcy of preserving the class structure by controlling popular rebellion. This is revealed in Obama’s criminalizing Snowden’s revelations so that they would not effect change in normal pathology.