Alain Ehrenberg

Mental pathology and, more generally, psychic suffering, which is at the center of the mental health concern, appear as symptomatic of exhausted willpower, with the risk of falling into inaction. Numerous commentaries conceive them not only as issues of public health of utmost importance – a recurrent discourse since the 1990s –, but beyond to civilization or modernity evils. Thus, perceived at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of industrial work, fatigue is today considered as a sign of revolt of the individual against work, which doesn’t make sense anymore. This essay answers two questions: why is there a privileged connection between society and mental health? Why do mental health problems seem to be an elective material to talk about social evils? Mental health problems have become transversal concerns in the context of collective representations of normative autonomy because they highlight an emotional dimension which was marginal before. Such a society at the same time demands strong emotional self-control and a capacity to express one’s emotions. From this point of view, mental health represents a reconceptualization of health: through it, social relationships have entered the field of health.

The notions of subjectivity, affect, emotion, and moral feelings today impregnate the whole of society, and they are becoming increasingly perceptible in the area of scientific knowledge as well.1 This preoccupation with emotions developed initially in the wake of the advent of a more permissive society in the 1970s, and then with changes in the organization of capitalism, where flexible work has replaced the Taylorist and Fordist models of divided labor, and also with the crisis of the social welfare system in the 1980s. In both Europe and North America, mental suffering and mental health problems have gradually come to occupy a prominent position in daily life in developed societies. Indeed, a vast and varied..

My article in this issue of PPP is based on a lengthy book, La Société du malaise, in which I examine the shift from Oedipal neurosis to narcissistic pathologies in France and in the United States, viewing this shift in connection with changes in social ideals regarding autonomy that I summarize as autonomy–aspiration and autonomy–condition. Using the notion of social pathology, I consider sociological/anthropological dimensions of so-called mental health problems by viewing them as individualistic ways of dealing with adversity or misfortune in a form of life permeated with the autonomy–ideal. Changes in ways of acting in society go together with changes in forms of being..