Society as a Patient: Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of Self and Social Transformations

The article is a transdisciplinary effort bringing sociology, philosophy, psychology and spirituality together in understanding health, social suffering and healing in our contemporary world. It discusses the concept of society as a patient, which challenges us to go beyond an individualised notion of healing. It links this understanding to the contemporary discourse of social suffering. But to transform this it is argued that we need both political and spiritual transformations. In order to transform suffering of self and society, we need to undertake creative suffering on our part. This involves critiquing the existing distinction between normality and pathology. Metapathology, offered by Abraham Maslow and Chitta Ranjan Das, critiques the social construction of pathology and deliberately accepts a mode of life which may be considered pathological by the existing society but bears seeds of critique and transformation.