Unlike Werther, Goethe was a genius, with the brilliance, energy, and resourcefulness that enabled him to overcome the class discrimination he faced. - Scheff, 1990, 120
“Ultimately, it is the community that cures… What happens, however, if the community itself is disordered” (?) (Reiff, 2006, 57)
No one had paid George any attention for years. Now doctors, attendants, and nurses all talked to him and watched eagerly to see what effect the medication would have. His condition improved rapidly. After only two weeks of treatment, he was moved to a ward for less disturbed patients, where he took part in a number of activities. Soon he was doing so well that he was moved up again. By this time, he had formed lively relationships with the other patients and many members of the hospital staff. He began spending several hours a day with paints and clay, using them to express the rich fantasy life that had previously interested no one. His doctors marveled. Attendants praised his skill. George was discharged from the hospital thirty, eight days after his first dose of Thorazine. As he was checking out, he remembered that he had left something behind, went back to his room, and returned with an old sock. The puzzled attendant who asked to see it found thirty, eight Thorazine pills carefully stashed inside the sock. Why, then, had George suddenly come to life?, Dallett 1988, 15 in Mills, 2014
Philosophy leads to death; sociology leads to suicide. - Baudrillard
Where Freud is in complete agreement with Weber is in his view that the entire Promethean megastructure of modernity, forged of iron and fire, has failed to make people happy and has generated discontent all of its own. The modern metropolis, the city that never sleeps, is also the city that never stops suffering. It is a city of a million nightmares, a million neuroses, a million painful stories. It is a city of broken families, uprooted lives, constant anxieties, in short, a phantasmagoria of unhappiness. - Yvannis, 2005
Nowadays, people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private spheres in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close, up scenes of work, family, and neighborhood; in other spheres, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and threats that transcend their immediate surroundings, the more trapped they seem to feel. - C. Wright Mill
As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naïve or magical perception that produced their fatalism gives way to a perception capable of perceiving itself even as it perceives reality, can thus be critically objective about that reality. A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as a historical reality susceptible to transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry. - Freire
You don’t think about tasks, spreadsheets, and things that are productive for capitalist society, but instead about things that bring you joy? I diagnose you with Maladaptive Daydreaming. - The Instagram account Rhizomatic Memer
One problem with this therapeutic approach, however, is that the goal of harmonious social adaptation is not challenged. - Paulsen, 2020, 264
The pandemic of mental anguish afflicting our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals. - Fisher, 2011
The individual is led to believe that with a little self, help, alienation will be washed down the drain like dirt in a sparkling sink. - Jacoby, 1996, 67
Psychotherapy and psychotropic medications are the primary tools used today in modern “care of souls.” This approach has had mixed results. Psychotherapy and psychiatry appear to have enough problems of their own that other avenues toward more effective mental health care need to be explored. This book is a response to the monopoly on diagnosis, analysis, and practice held by psychology and, above all, psychiatry (Cohen, 2016; Morrall, 2008). This monopoly persists even as sociologists also engage in diagnosis and analysis. Furthermore, social theory can be said to have a therapeutic foundation and aims to be healing (Reiff, 2006). Sociological diagnoses have been applied to individuals in the context of their situations. Psychology has sought to diagnose what deviates from the norm, where the threshold for diagnosis is set as an expression of a dysfunction in the individual (APA, 2013). While psychology has diagnosed the deviant, sociology has often diagnosed the normal.
Pierre Bourdieu has suggested that sociology is about forging weapons, a martial art for self, defense, revealing what is hidden, and being amazed by what one “has always thought one understood,” as seen in other quotes from him:
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.
If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.
I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self, defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.
The difficulty in sociology is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.
This book can be seen as a way to forge sociological weapons in the search for the good life.
Roland Paulsen points out how contemporary society is dominated by the idea of an inward, focused care for the self (2020). Paulsen argues instead that the better way to care for the self is to look outward toward the world in an effort to make it better (2020). Paulsen joins other thinkers who have pointed out that the meaning the individual seeks is found in projects outside the self (e.g., Yeager et al., 2013; Frankl, 2006; Taylor, 1991). Charles Taylor has pointed out how contemporary modernity is characterized by a “malaise”, a sense of unease or illness, due to a lack of meaning that causes people to lose a sense of fullness (2007, 2021). Nietzsche wrote the famous words: “We have discovered happiness, says the Last Man, and blinks.” Nietzsche saw early on in modernity a passive nihilism that makes happiness the ultimate goal in life, displacing honor, excitement, heroism, virtues, and adventure.
Lindblom aptly describes the present day as “difficult to live in” (2023). This difficulty stems in part from a lack of language to articulate how and why life is difficult. This book proposes how sociology can be used to create an alternative language to the dominant psychological and psychiatric discourse through socioanalysis and sociological diagnoses. It is also a proposal for how sociotherapy as a practice can be revived and become a research program that can lead to socio, education, sociotherapeutic practice, and even sociologized “self”, help. McGee (2005) and Paulsen (2020) are sociologists who have argued for a sociological approach to self, help. This is a book about how sociology can support the search for, the pursuit of, and the creation of the good life. Several sociologists have pointed out the importance of not only highlighting the problems with criticism that is essential, but also pointing to alternatives and building sociological practical wisdom (Rosa, 2019; Holmes, 2016; Paulsen, 2020; Thompson & Thompson, 2019; Bourdieu, 2001; Lamont, 2023; Savage, 2021).
This book is being released in conjunction with the book The Society of Mediocrity and Aristotelian Balance Theory (ABT) (Berglund, 2026). That book is an attempt to systematize the pursuit and realization of the good life. That book analyzes society’s shortcomings in supporting people seeking fulfillment in economics, politics, the public sphere, technology, culture, and education. This book will use ABT as a foundation for a more practical attempt to change society through the dissemination of sociological consciousness. I view these books as complementary to one another. The former book lays the foundation for ABT as a theory, and in this one, the theory is applied in a sociotherapeutic context to challenge psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry as the dominant frameworks for “modern soul care.”
This book can be viewed as a complementary discourse to, but also as a discourse of resistance against, the dominant psychiatric hegemony (Cohen, 2016; Rose, 2019) and the psychotherapeutic discourse (Illouz, 2008; Furedi, 2004, 2017). It does so by drawing on the conceptual framework already present in sociology and presenting it as a more clearly articulated alternative to the psychiatric discourse. Diagnoses and concepts used to understand ourselves carry power, repressive, controlling, and productive. It shapes us. Sociologists have also focused on the political functions and explanations for why the psychiatric discourse has become so dominant in society (Cohen, 2016; Rose, 2019). What several sociologists have pointed out is psychiatry’s depoliticizing influence on the whole, and to a lesser extent, a reshaping of political engagement through a psychiatric subjectivity. Viewing oneself as having “true depression”, or, as some psychiatrists have described it, “biological depression”, is very different from describing oneself as alienated, atomized, and infantilized. Diagnoses are concepts; that is, they are ways of grasping reality, and with different concepts, we can grasp reality in different ways.
This book can be used as a way to self, diagnose within the social context, and above all, within the social world of which one is a part and which influences one. It should be used heuristically, that is, not as a definitive truth. A sociological understanding of depression opens the door to a completely different way of articulating the difficulty one is facing. Sociological diagnoses that can foster a different understanding include, for example, alienation, a blasé attitude due to overstimulation (Simmel, 1971), anomie and solipsism (Durkheim, 1950), withdrawal from communities (Tocqueville in Lipset, 1963), disenchantment (Weber, 2001), fear of risk (Furedi, 2019), fatigue from competition (Davies, 2015), low emotional energy due to failed social interactions (Collins, 2004), acceleration (Rosa, 2013), the specter of meaninglessness (Sennett, 2002), atomized housing and infrastructure (Berglund, 2026), and technologization (Postman, 1984, 1991). Together, these various sociological diagnoses and conditions identified by different sociologists form a framework (Rose, 2019) that differs significantly from a psychiatric diagnosis.
The joke is that if you go to a psychotherapist with anxiety about climate change, for example, the risk that the “Atlantic Current,” or AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), might weaken or collapse, the CBT, oriented psychotherapist would ask what “evidence” there is for your “catastrophic thinking.” This joke is based on the assumption that psychotherapy often views negative thoughts as “irrational” and not grounded in reality. Aversion to a climate collapse is likened to a phobia or avoidance behavior. The problem with this framing is that people today face challenges that are far greater than the individual, some of which are at a potentially catastrophic level that one wants to avoid. Risks such as climate change, which we are already experiencing, are a prime example of how today’s society can be described both as a “laboratory society,” where we conduct experiments on ourselves at the societal level using new technologies, and simultaneously as a “risk society” due to the risks associated with these new technologies (Beck, 1992).
The joke above depicts a session with a poor psychotherapist who fails to validate the person’s feelings as legitimate. This is a psychologist who lacks an understanding of, or training in, the psychological research conducted in the field of climate psychology. Today, there are psychotherapists who specialize in “climate anxiety” or “climate distress” as a condition and, more broadly, “political anxiety.” These climate psychologists would not treat the person as depicted in the joke. What general psychotherapy, and even climate psychologists, lack, however, is what sociological imagination can provide to complement and support the client. This is what will be proposed here, since it is not only the deviant that needs healing but also normality.
The sociological therapy presented here would diagnose, as sociologists have done before, the pathologies or imbalances that have led to the climate crisis and the reasons why not enough is still being done. Sociotherapy would diagnose the society and socialities in which one is embedded that allow climate change to continue. For example, one problem identified as an inability to act against climate change is that people today often live in a “dual reality” that shields them from insights, where they oscillate between apathy and anger, preventing them from building the momentum and energy needed to methodically take action to solve problems related to climate change (Norgaard, 2011). Psychotherapeutic thinking tends to view catastrophic thinking as irrational, whereas sociotherapy would view a lack of insight into potential catastrophe as irrational. Sociotherapy, however, would not encourage people to adopt “catastrophic thinking” per se, which would be a form of fatalism. Instead, sociotherapy could support “critical optimism” (Holmes, 2016), in which one does not turn a blind eye to the problems, dilemmas, ambiguities, and paradoxes that people face, while at the same time seeking to support and cultivate optimism and courage. It is neither about exaggerating the problem nor downplaying it, but about facing it exactly as it is. Changes in the AMOC should be addressed with a balance between different ways of understanding risk in order to capture the epistemic and moral uncertainty. What has become dominant in today’s risk society regarding the climate is a one, sided “wait- and-see” attitude, where one observes what happens before acting based on the precautionary principle (Taleb, 2012). In the context of climate change, sociotherapy should not be about alarmism but about facing genuine uncertainty with courage. Sociotherapy needs to support the client in managing the risk of the Atlantic Ocean Current’s collapse without leading to fatalism, unfounded hope, mysticism, etc., but rather, as mentioned, critical optimism (Holmes, 2016). A joke about a bad sociotherapist would be that one goes to them for support with feelings of anxiety regarding the climate. The sociotherapist would then validate the client’s feelings but point out that they are trapped within these structures. This would be just as problematic as leaving the client with fatalism, a cruel pessimism a mirror image of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011).
Furthermore, the psychotherapeutization and psychiatrization of society and people’s consciousness can in themselves be seen as a contributing factor to the climate crisis. This is because their effects have generally been to depoliticize and emotionalize life goals, thereby de, emphasizing moral life goals, creating a sense of vulnerability in some cases (Furedi, 2004, Morrall, 2008), but above all a fragility in relation to acting as a citizen when confronted with various societal problems (Sennett, 2002, 2013), decentered cultural and discursive resources that support a life filled with societal problems, causing private tragedies to become less central and magnified (Furedi, 2019; Nussbaum, 2003, 2011). Psychotherapy has been part of the “lifestyleification” of contemporary society, in which one lives a “good” life disconnected from moral value, and thus distinct from an ethically good life (Berglund, 2026; Bellah et al., 1984; Taylor, 1991, 2001; McKerracher, 2023), since the goals set in psychotherapy are happiness, “flexibility”, “insight”, or “better communication skills” (Illouz, 2008, 2019; Furedi, 2019). Goals such as courage (Furedi, 2019), heroism (Taylor, 2001, 2004, Becker, 1973), stewardship (Jackall, 2010), negation (Adorno, 1973), responsibility (Arendt, 1998), care (Tronto, 1993, Paulsen, 2020), consciousness, raising (Friere, 2000), adventure (Simmel, 1971), flourishing, and wisdom for and within society, not just one’s own life, are becoming less prominent in the current era of psychotherapy.
While psychotherapy generally tends to support the client as a privatized individual, sociotherapy aims to address the client as a citizen and support them in a “civic struggle” (Berglund, 2026) in which one fights for the common good.
Sociological therapy is an attempt to better address, through the social sphere, the void that psychotherapy has been unable to fill. The thesis of this book is that this is best achieved by drawing on sociological wisdom, which seeks causes and solutions in the social realm rather than in an individual who is, of course, viewed in abstraction from the rest of society. Modern people’s relationship to the climate crisis is just one example of how society shapes our well, being. It is not only those who experience “climate anxiety” who are affected; everyone is affected, even those who feel unaffected. This sense of detachment can manifest as indifference toward what is happening to oneself and to others. Sociological therapy aims to be useful for various problems and states of being, even for those who are not aware of their own problems.
This book is thus an attempt to create a different “diagnostic culture” (Brinkmann, 2016), a diagnostic culture that can support the pursuit of the good life based on sociological wisdom.