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1 online resource (162 pages) |
| Summary |
"Human society is not simply the algebraic sum total of individual persons. It is an entity of its own, with various specific organizations, each with different aims, often interfering and competing with each other and mostly overlapping. Everybody belongs to several of these groupings. Inadequacy of such organizations often exerts a confusing and greatly disturbing effect on the individual trapped in the web of ever increasing complexity of social organization. Promotion of mental health and hygiene--a goal of high priority in modem world society--can only be achieved by recognizing and improving inadequacies of social organization. It cannot be achieved merely by securing greater facilities and better care for the mentally disturbed individual. Much has been written about human stupidity, both individual and collective, but this is only one factor accounting for inadequacies and only one facet presented by the psychopathology of human society. Other facets of man as part of a collective are unhampered release of instinctual urges, deviation of emotional response, incongruity of feeling, reasoning, and action, or suppression of individuality by conformism to the masses. Our present contribution does not claim to disclose new facts or discoveries. It attempts only to offer a glimpse at the writing on the wall in order to realize the impending dangers threatening the insidious decay of what we call our Western culture"--Preface |
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"The fascinating progress of our civilization during the last one hundred years was possible only by increasing specialization of all kinds of human activities. This trend prevails in technology, science, biology, humanities such as linguistics, medicine. In medicine the ever increasing legitimate specialization has history, geography, or anthropology, in jurisprudence, and in led to tremendous progress in our knowledge about the normal and abnormal function of various organs. It has yielded many new valuable tools for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, skillful craftsmanship developed to an unheard of mastery. Each part of the human being, if in need, has better chances to be restored today than ever before. Laboratories supply us with new methods for diagnosis and management of disturbed functions. The attention of the doctor shifted from the sick individual to the laboratory reports about morphological (biopsy), biochemical, immunological and functional tests. Much of what had previously belonged to the art of medicine became an apparently more solid and reliable result of the science of medicine. More science, but also more mechanization and depersonalization of medicine, was the result. Time and again it has been emphasized that a person is more than the sum of his parts and that the person with a disease, rather than the disease of a person, must be taken care of. Mutual repercussions of organic diseases on the mental state and of mental disorders on various organs cannot be recognized by laboratory tests. Only thorough study and knowledge of the "person behind the disease" enables us fully to understand why he is suffering and what should be done to relieve or cure his sufferings. Respect for the individuality of person who is different from all other beings demands a holistic concept of medicine--that is, integration of all parts of a human being into one unique entity: the individual person. For practical medical purposes we had to study the "person behind the disease." For sociological purposes we are going to investigate the "society behind the person.""--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved) |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 156-159) |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
Social psychology.
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Psychology, Social
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social psychology.
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Social psychology
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| Form |
Electronic book
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