Bert van den Bergh – författare

This book brings together the work of the late Anders Petersen, presenting his exciting and innovative transdisciplinary paradigm that offers insights into anxiety, depression and grief, and the connection between these conditions and the failings of contemporary civilization that give rise to them. With attention to the ways in which neoliberal hegemony and its imperatives of ‘performance’, ‘evaluation’, ‘self-realisation’, ‘resilience’ and ‘flexibility’ lead to self-criticism on the part of those who do not measure up to the prevailing criteria, resulting in ailments of mental health, it challenges the paradigmatic diagnosis of such conditions in terms of individual diseases or neurological malfunctions, to be treated by medication and training in order to return the individual to work and life ‘as normal’. An examination of the wrong-headed approach to what Petersen analysed as contemporary social pathologies, Enduring Modernity: Depression, Anxiety and Grief in the Age of Voicelessness will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, seeking new understandings aimed at emancipation from social suffering.

This book brings together the work of the late Anders Petersen, presenting his exciting and innovative transdisciplinary paradigm that offers insights into anxiety, depression and grief, and the connection between these conditions and the failings of contemporary civilization that give rise to them. With attention to the ways in which neoliberal hegemony and its imperatives of ‘performance’, ‘evaluation’, ‘self-realisation’, ‘resilience’ and ‘flexibility’ lead to self-criticism on the part of those who do not measure up to the prevailing criteria, resulting in ailments of mental health, it challenges the paradigmatic diagnosis of such conditions in terms of individual diseases or neurological malfunctions, to be treated by medication and training in order to return the individual to work and life ‘as normal’. An examination of the wrong-headed approach to what Petersen analysed as contemporary social pathologies, Enduring Modernity: Depression, Anxiety and Grief in the Age of Voicelessness will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, seeking new understandings aimed at emancipation from social suffering.

This book analyses three of the most prevalent illnesses of late modernity: anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, in terms of their relation to cultural pathologies of the social body. Usually these conditions are interpreted clinically in terms of individualized symptoms and responded to discretely, as though for the most part unrelated to each other. However, these diseases also have a social and cultural profile that transcends their particular symptomologies and etiologies. Anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s are diseases related to disorders of the collective esprit de corps of contemporary society.

Multidisciplinary in approach, the book addresses questions of how these conditions are manifest at both the individual and collective levels in relation to hegemonic biomedical and psychologistic understandings. Rejecting such reductive diagnoses, the authors argue that anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other contemporary epidemics, are to be analysed in the light of individual and collective experiences of profound and radical changes in our civilization. A diagnosis of our times, Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents will appeal to a broad range of scholars with interests in health and illness, the sociology of medicine and contemporary life.