Lidea that society is depressed, or tired, to use the title from the book of the Jean Jaurès Foundation, pinpoints sensitive issues, but it is misleading. In what ? And why is it important to understand it?
A lot of recent information goes against my questions. The World Health Organization published in November 2020 a note on the “Pandemic fatigue”, “Nervous fatigue or mental exhaustion, which leads to immobility”. “Depression, sleep disorders, anxiety … the disturbing psychic effects of the pandemic and of confinement”, headlines an article in World November 26, 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought mental health issues to the fore. All this psychic suffering is crossed by fatigue, the slowing down of thought and action, even by immobility.
The idea is misleading because it treats society like a big individual, thus confusing “Individual” and “Individualism”. Every society gives way to the individual, but only ours are individualists. It means that individualism is a social spirit, a common spirit. And it is this common spirit which has been modified and which has favored the transformation of questions relating to the specialized field of psychiatry and clinical psychology into a central concern of our societies, affecting all social and personal life, in the company, at school …
How does this concern reveal the social spirit of today’s individualistic society?
Fatigue considered as mental exhaustion became a central theme, with depression, during the 1970s, at the same time as epidemiologists noted, with supporting statistics, that the latter was now the most developed mental disorder in societies. Western. Not only is this pathology much more widespread than previously thought, but it is changing in significance in psychopathology and in society. The evolution of psychoanalysis with regard to it makes it possible to understand this double change.
Depressions and anxieties are first considered by Freud and psychoanalysts as a symptom of neuroses (hysteria, phobia, obsession), which are the expression of an oedipal psychic conflict between the ego and the superego (interdictor). It is therefore a conflict between the permit and the prohibited. In a disciplined society, depression raises both a common and personal question: what am I allowed to do?
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