Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood by Elisa Magrì & Dermot Moran

Author:Elisa Magrì & Dermot Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Would such social illness also be a caused occurrence and not a historical event in the same way as mental illness is? It clearly involves some level of individual responsibility, but only for what Hannah Arendt would call ‘banal’ things: being superficial, being inconsistent, or being one-sided in one’s commitment. The inner fragmentation in the masses, which is unsupportive of individual responsibility and a conductor for sentient contagion is reinforced by events that assault the social mechanisms12 established to support community in the same way as mental and physical illness result from systemic assaults on the psychic mechanisms supporting the person. The spiritual reality of community is supported on the one hand by associational structures by which human beings organise themselves; and on the other by the herd instinct, parallel to and caused by the psychic mechanism of sentient contagion. That mechanisms supporting the spiritual reality of the human community forms part of it reflects the fact that human beings are not pure spirits, but have their spiritual life supported both by what they create themselves and by a psychic and biological life also on the intersubjective, social level.13 The social functions of institutions, established in purpose-built buildings and regulated by customs and law are all socially constructed ‘mechanisms’, but not for that less the real infrastructure of culture. When natural or historical events destroy the functionality of these abruptly or over a period of time without allowing new institutions, buildings and customs to arise from the remnants of the old, then the community is attacked in the functionality that supports it. This attack may well come from well-meaning individuals within it, who desire to break with old traditions, perceived as oppressive. But the limited life power available to the community from its members, no matter how positively engaged these would be for the community, and no matter how severely threatened by an outside enemy they are, does not allow it to reinvent its functionality instantaneously. Such re-emergence takes time and a concerted effort that is only possible when new operational modes have established themselves by being recognised by the members. The community is thus exposed, in its reduction to a mass, to a severe shortage of life power – all that power, namely, it would take to (re-)create its supportive functionality instantaneously. Its functionality shattered, the community’s channelling of the available life power according to a vision of the common good no longer obtains. Compensation mechanisms (dictatorships, scapegoat campaigns and pursuit of particular interests falling back on the remaining social mechanism of herd mentality operational through sentient contagion) kick in, until such time as the community gets the time and leadership needed to rebuild itself. Mental and social illnesses thus are thus both analogous and related phenomena, according to Stein, in that they both rely on psychic causality as the medium through which they are provoked – and healed.

In what follows, we shall first look more in depth at Stein’s understanding of the psyche as a whole and as a unity (1) in order to establish its plausibility.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.