1st Edition
Enduring Modernity Depression, Anxiety and Grief in the Age of Voicelessnes
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, Depression, Anxiety and Grief in the Age of Voicelessnes will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, seeking new understandings aimed at emancipation from social suffering.
Acknowledgement
Anders Petersen – his life and memory
The original publication of the chapters
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: The Work of Anders Petersen
Bert van den Bergh, Sabine Flick, Kieran Keohane, Domonkos Sik
Part 1: Depression, Anxiety and Happiness
2. Introduction to part 1
Carmen Kuhling
3. Authentic Self-Realization and Depression
Anders Petersen
4. Return of the Age of Anxiety: The Embedding of a Late Modern Social Pathology
Anders Petersen
5. ‘Clap Along if You Feel Like a Room Without a Roof’: Understanding the Pursuit of Happiness as Ideology
Anders Petersen
6. Depression: Emotion and (or) Dis-Connection in Late Modern Society
Anders Petersen, Bert van den Bergh
Part 2: Liberalism and Disenfranchisement
7. Introduction to part 2
Søren Christian Krogh
8. The Demand for Flexibility as a Process of Disenfranchisement
Anders Petersen, Rasmus Willig
9. Evaluations as a Process of Disenfranchisement
Anders Petersen, Rasmus Willig
Part 3: Grief and Diagnostic Culture
10. Introduction to part 3
Svend Brinkmann
11. Grief: The Painfulness of Permanent Human Absence
Anders Petersen, Michael Hviid Jacobsen
12. Grief in an Individualized Society: A Critical Corrective to the Advancement of Diagnostic Culture
Anders Petersen, Michael Hviid Jacobsen
13. Outro: Working with Anders Petersen - A Dialogue with Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Søren Christian Krogh and Carmen Kuhling
14. Index
Biography
Anders Petersen was Associate Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and former President of the Danish Sociological Association.
Domonkos Sik is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary.
Bert van den Bergh teaches cultural philosophy in the Department of European Studies at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.
Sabine Flick is Professor of Sociology at The Institute for Sociology at the University of Education, Freiburg, Germany.
Kieran Keohane is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and the School of Society, Politics and Ethics at University College Cork, Ireland.
