{"title":"Not “Coddling” but “Rewiring”: Explaining Psychic Harm","authors":"Cassandra Sever","doi":"10.1007/s12115-024-01015-2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Sensitivity to harm has become a crisis, and the reasons for this remain unexplained. Across organizations, individuals express psychic damage from trauma to microaggressions. Some call this rise in harm-oriented claims a loss of resilience due to an excess of “coddling.” Although harm is innately social, sociologists have seldom studied the deeper sources of this crisis. I advance a theoretical model to explain how psychic harm functions. The article considers why an eagerness to be perceived as socially marginalized has become commonplace. With in-depth interviews, I illustrate micro-level mechanisms that explain the individual advantages to asserting such claims. These psychic harm mechanisms reveal that social science has fundamentally shifted how individuals understand the self, others, and interaction. New disciplinary discourses—comprising a new epistemology—have contributed to rewiring how younger educated generations understand themselves and others, and these generations tend to spread the new ways of knowing across society. Ferreting out different forms of harm begets demands for ever-more diverse forms of safety, which has profound implications for free speech. I suggest that social science’s pronounced efforts to diminish inequality through a conjoined moral and political epistemology ultimately create a new system of stratification.</p>","PeriodicalId":47267,"journal":{"name":"Society","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-024-01015-2","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Sensitivity to harm has become a crisis, and the reasons for this remain unexplained. Across organizations, individuals express psychic damage from trauma to microaggressions. Some call this rise in harm-oriented claims a loss of resilience due to an excess of “coddling.” Although harm is innately social, sociologists have seldom studied the deeper sources of this crisis. I advance a theoretical model to explain how psychic harm functions. The article considers why an eagerness to be perceived as socially marginalized has become commonplace. With in-depth interviews, I illustrate micro-level mechanisms that explain the individual advantages to asserting such claims. These psychic harm mechanisms reveal that social science has fundamentally shifted how individuals understand the self, others, and interaction. New disciplinary discourses—comprising a new epistemology—have contributed to rewiring how younger educated generations understand themselves and others, and these generations tend to spread the new ways of knowing across society. Ferreting out different forms of harm begets demands for ever-more diverse forms of safety, which has profound implications for free speech. I suggest that social science’s pronounced efforts to diminish inequality through a conjoined moral and political epistemology ultimately create a new system of stratification.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1962, Society enjoys a wide reputation as a journal that publishes the latest scholarship on the central questions of contemporary society. It produces six issues a year offering new ideas and quality research in the social sciences and humanities in a clear, accessible style.
Society sees itself as occupying the vital center in intellectual and political debate. Put negatively, this means the journal is opposed to all forms of dogmatism, absolutism, ideological uniformity, and facile relativism. More positively, it seeks to champion genuine diversity of opinion and a recognition of the complexity of the world''s issues.
Society includes full-length research articles, commentaries, discussion pieces, and book reviews which critically examine work conducted in the social sciences as well as the humanities. The journal is of interest to scholars and researchers who work in these broadly-based fields of enquiry and those who conduct research in neighboring intellectual domains. Society is also of interest to non-specialists who are keen to understand the latest developments in such subjects as sociology, history, political science, social anthropology, philosophy, economics, and psychology.
The journal’s interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the variety of esteemed thinkers who have contributed to Society since its inception. Contributors have included Simone de Beauvoir, Robert K Merton, James Q. Wilson, Margaret Mead, Abraham Maslow, Richard Hoggart, William Julius Wilson, Arlie Hochschild, Alvin Gouldner, Orlando Patterson, Katherine S. Newman, Patrick Moynihan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, David Riesman, Amitai Etzioni and many other eminent thought leaders.
The success of the journal rests on attracting authors who combine originality of thought and lucidity of expression. In that spirit, Society is keen to publish both established and new authors who have something significant to say about the important issues of our time.