On Socially Generated Pain

Grażyna OSIKA

Department of Applied Social Sciences, Faculty of Organization and Management, Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, ul. Roosevelta 26-28, building A, room 219, 41-800 Zabrze, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to describe some forms of oppression associated with the emergence of a social structure known as institutionalized individualization. The present study was based on theoretical analysis. The research included defining such categories as: social individualization, institutionalized individualization, social pain, and civic schizophrenia, and it focused on the relationship between them. It has been assumed that institutionalized individualism puts social actors in a new existential situation in which individuals, along with the hardship of their lives, remain isolated, which produces a mental strain capable of generating pathological phenomena. Thus a new recognition and understanding of some social phenomena became possible, among them, an increase in the number of cases of depression. The novelty of the present analysis lies in its attempt to apply the category of social pain as an explicative instrument helpful in a description of the issue in question.

Keywords:

social individualization, institutionalized individualization, social pain, civic schizophrenia, depression