I think it is possible that some *mental* illnesses might be caused by some
form of *social* influence. Freud in the Victorian era and his patients come to
mind. Or Goethe's first book "The Sorrrows of Young Werther" which is about a
poor young guy in the 18th century who kills himself because he can not get the
woman he desires - an aristocratic woman out of his reach. If society forces
people to act against their deepest desires it can make them mad. I would say
this is rather rare in our free and liberal societies today.The book from
Bernard Guerin asks interesting questions: how are our behaviours shaped by
social systems? How do we get from sociological to individual? How do social
structures shape and impact individual behaviour? How do we change other
people's behaviour? By convincing them with arguments and stories? Interesting
questions.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Steve Smith <[email protected]> Date:
1/25/23 12:41 AM (GMT+01:00) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM]
Turning Psychology into a Social Science On 1/24/23 3:55 PM, Jochen Fromm
wrote:> I am currently browsing the millions of books in the Berlin state >
library. They have so many books that they are a "closed stack" > library where
you have to order every book you want to read (unlike > most open-stack
university libraries). One of the books I have > stumbled upon today is named
"Turning Psychology into a Social > Science" by Bernard Guerin, a professor of
psychology at the > University of Southern Australia in Adelaide.You can't just
ask chatGPT the question "what does Bernard Guerin have to say about Turning
Psychology into a Social Science?" ? I'm guessing OpenAI *hasn't* ingested
that work so it would have derive it's answer from reviews or synopses and
quotes and references from other works?> The idea in his book is to focus on
the social interactions that > determine the behavior and shape human actions.
Similar to the > fundamental idea we have discussed earlier that subjective
experience > can be understood by the particular slice of the world someone has
> perceived.>> IIRC it was this discussion that made me think that cinemas are
just > machines to solve the hard problem of consciousness: they show us what >
it is like to be someone else by revealing us all the essential social >
interactions and contexts that shaped the behavior of a person.I really like
this way of characterizing it.Mary and I discuss often the value and utility of
literature in a general education. She and I have somewhat complementary
tastes in literature and non-fiction but we both appreciate the others' and
gain something from the discussions/readings/quotes we share from one another.
For example, Mary has a strong fascination with various forms of social abuse
and in particular political incarceration. For example, she just finished
Gustaw Herling's memoir " A World Apart"... a Pole who was put into the Soviet
prison system *before* the start of WWII with Germany... as a Pole, he was
fighting their (then ally) Germany and therefore considered an "enemy of the
(Soviet) state".I have also held the un(der)founded opinion that a great deal
of what we consider to be a *mental* illness is actually a *social* illness:
the cognitive dissonance experienced with one's social context can be something
"wrong" with both/either the individual or their context.-. --- - / ...- .-
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