Editor's Column: Social Symptoms

In addition to material scarcity, bodily vulnerability, and human aggression, other fundamental causes of human misery are social actions, practices, institutions, and conditions that cost a society more than they contribute to its life. Such phenomena are social symptoms, and they are to the collective what Freud described “psychical symptoms” as being to the individual:

Psychical (or psychogenic) symptoms … are acts detrimental, or at least useless, to the subject's life as a whole, often complained of by him as unwelcome and bringing unpleasure and suffering to him. The main damage they do resides in the mental expenditure which they themselves involve and in the future expenditure that becomes necessary for fighting against them. Where there is an extensive formation of symptoms, these two sorts of expenditure can result in an extraordinary impoverishment of the subject in regard to the mental energy available to him and so in paralysing him for all the important tasks of life. (Lectures 358)

Social symptoms, similarly, are collective actions—including passivity, or the failure to act effectively to change undesirable but unnecessary conditions—that result in greater cost than benefit. That is, social symptoms are actions that fail to provide needed benefits even though the knowledge and material resources for providing these benefits are available. Social symptoms, then, include 1) any social problem the existence or severity of which is not inevitable, 2) any ineffective or inefficient collective attempt to solve a collective problem or meet a collective need, and 3) any other social practices, institutions, or conditions, or mass behaviors that are not inevitable and whose deleterious effects on the collectivity outweigh their benefits.

Examples of the first category include racism, sexism, and heterosexism; interpersonal, intergroup, and international violence; preventable deaths from certain illnesses (e.g., AIDS) and certain types