Pratique du Shadowing: Mental Illness as a Crisis of Meaning in Modern Society - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube
C2
Modern society is characterised by many things,
278 phrases
Si les phrases sont trop courtes ou trop longues, cliquez sur Edit pour les ajuster.
1
Modern society is characterised by many things,
2
but perhaps most notably by the remarkable scientific and technological advancement,
3
as well as capitalism, individualism and hedonism.
4
We are wealthier than our ancestors,
5
we live in more safe and comfortable environments,
6
we have more access to food and other basic needs.
7
Why then have we seen a massive spike in mental illness?
8
The bulk of evidence concludes
9
that there seems to have been a significant rise in the incidence of lunacy in the 19th century,
10
and that this increase consisted largely of patients with the illness we now call schizophrenia.
11
One of the most widely ramifying features of modernity is the intense focus on the value and power of the individual self,
12
to turn away from the search of an objective external order
13
and to instead turn inward and become aware of our own connectivity.
14
This becomes a pervasive feature of human experience and self-knowledge in the 19th century.
15
Western culture is dominated by individualism,
16
subjectivism and relativism, with the rise of a new character type that dominates our age,
17
the psychological man, who is intent upon the conquest of his inner life.
18
Mental illness must also be viewed in line with a modern social structure,
19
with bureaucratisation, technologisation, secularization, and rationalization of the modern world on the level of individual experience.
20
The conditions of modern life,
21
with its rational forms of social organization,
22
are more complex, conflicting, and require potentially disorienting cognitive requirements.
23
While there is an emphasis on individuality,
24
one must also simultaneously adapt to society's evolving needs.
25
The problem arises when these two are in contradiction,
26
leading to a sense of inner division.
27
In the myth of mental illness,
28
psychiatrist Thomas Sass criticises the psychiatric establishment who uses mental illness as a metaphor to describe an offending
29
or disturbing pattern of behaviour under the wide-ranging term schizophrenia as an illness or disease.
30
Sass wrote, if you talk to God, you are praying.
31
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
32
If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist.
33
If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.
34
While many behave and think in disturbing ways,
35
this does not mean they actually have a disease.
36
Unlike physical illness and disease,
37
mental illness is judged from certain psychosocial, ethical or legal norms.
38
Transgressing these is not a consequence of illness,
39
but of the attempt to confront and tackle the problems in living.
40
Sass does not suggest that mental illnesses do not exist,
41
rather he is claiming that many such phenomena is a consequence of the attempt to confront
42
and to tackle the problem of how to live,
43
and to identify such phenomena as a disease
44
or an illness is to hide the very real problems in living that people face.
45
With increasing understanding of himself and of the world,
46
modern man feels that he is free to direct his own life and must take responsibility for it.
47
We are, as Jean-Paul Sartre asserted,
48
condemned to be free, condemned to shoulder the burden of our freedom and responsibility without being able to seek refuge in others.
49
We must be responsible for ourselves,
50
for we have no other way of experiencing ourselves or the world as being in any other mode than our own existence.
51
We cannot have our existence depend on somebody else,
52
for that would contradict the very core of our being.
53
We can ask for other people's opinions,
54
but the choice ultimately lies in us.
55
Many cannot stand this dizzying freedom.
56
Kierkegaard says that one can either get lost in the infinite,
57
a state of analysis paralysis,
58
where one thinks of the infinite possibilities but never acts,
59
or get lost in the finite,
60
becoming an imitation, a number,
61
a cipher in the crowd.
62
The latter is a finitude's despair,
63
or what we would now call depressive psychosis.
64
One cannot imagine any alternate ways of life and release himself from the trivial obligations that give him no value.
65
It is as if one has literally died to life,
66
but must remain physically in this world.
67
One lives dyingly.
68
Eventually, one faces the why of existence.
69
As Albert Camus writes, Rising,
70
streetcar, four hours in the office or factory.
71
Meal, streetcar, four hours of work.
72
Meal, sleep.
73
And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday day,
74
according to the same rhythm.
75
This path is easily followed most of the time,
76
but one day the why arises,
77
and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
78
Camus' absurd person is one who has seen through the ridiculous repetitions of daily life.
79
He is conscious of his Sisyphean condemnation.
80
We all have to push our own boulders and watch it roll back down.
81
If what we do does not satisfy our why of existence,
82
we must search for other alternatives or risk falling into an existential crisis.
83
A nauseating sensation of trying to justify one's existence,
84
which can lead to suicide.
85
One of Western civilization's most significant events is the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century,
86
a period which undermined the values that society had hitherto relied on,
87
namely on the religious view.
88
This engenders the most profound cultural,
89
sociological and psychological repercussions, leaving many facing a crisis in discerning a meaning
90
or purpose for their existence and struggling to tackle the problems in living that this gives rise to.
91
While we previously had ready answers to the problem of how life ought to be lived
92
and what its overall meaning and purpose was,
93
since faith in the existence of God gave us the reassurance that we are partaking in a divine project,
94
we are now slowly experiencing the consequences of what Nietzsche proclaimed as the death of God,
95
whose full consequences would elude many people as he made clear.
96
This tremendous event is still on its way,
97
still wandering, it has not yet reached the ears of men,
98
this deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars,
99
and yet they have done it themselves.
100
This realisation forces us to be faced with the terrifying question,
101
has existence any meaning at all?
102
The modern age is characterised by a sense of disorientation,
103
of not knowing what to do with one's life.
104
One notable figure who has attempted to respond to this existential crisis and the psychological manifestations of meaninglessness is Viktor Frankl,
105
who had been left in an existential vacuum.
106
The meaning crisis and mesoniosis of modern times is the unheard cry for meaning.
107
Frankl believes this is the cause of much of modernity's increase in mental illness.
108
It is the struggle to confront the existential vacuum.
109
He writes, Such widespread phenomena as depression,
110
aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognise the existential vacuum underlying them.
111
Frankel's therapeutic response to those experiencing such phenomena is to reorient the person to the meaning or the purpose of their existence,
112
to confront the question of the meaning of their existence,
113
to explore the question and,
114
ultimately, to provide a positive answer to it.
115
meaning to one's life is not to be understood as some idle
116
or academic curiosity that one engages in when more fundamental needs have been met.
117
The striving to search for and to possess a meaning
118
or a purpose for one's life is said to be the primary motivational force in man.
119
Without a meaning, all of life's struggles,
120
strivings and projects become ultimately futile.
121
Frankel believes that this sense of futility is what characterises addiction, aggression and depression.
122
There is nothing in the world that would
123
so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.
124
Frankel concludes, in a word,
125
each man is questioned by life,
126
and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life,
127
to life he can only respond by being responsible.
128
Modern man is in desperate need for the hero journey.
129
In Man and His Symbols,
130
Jungian psychologist Joseph Anderson describes the importance of the hero myth as a universal pattern throughout the world.
131
The hero descends into darkness to slay a dragon,
132
rescue a damsel in distress and gather the treasure.
133
The early weakness of the hero is balanced by the appearance
134
of strong guardians who enable him to perform the tasks that he cannot accomplish unaided.
135
Their role is the development of one's strengths and weaknesses,
136
in a manner that will equip one for the arduous tasks which life confronts him.
137
This can be linked to being dependent on one's parents.
138
It is only when one becomes independent and confronts the world by himself
139
that the individual has passed his initial test and can enter the mature phase of life.
140
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung's research brought him into the burning question,
141
what actually takes place inside the mentally ill?
142
He writes, To my mind,
143
therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story.
144
It is the patient's secret,
145
the rug against which he is shattered.
146
If I know his secret story,
147
I have a key to the treatment.
148
In most cases, exploration of the conscious material is insufficient.
149
In therapy, the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone.
150
We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality.
151
Jung treated many schizophrenic patients who were considered a lost cause.
152
The paradox of schizophrenia is that there is both a dissolution of the self in the world,
153
but also the dissolution of the world in the self.
154
Eternal punishment, but divine omnipotence.
155
The patient doubts that it is really him who is thinking his thoughts.
156
Reality might as well be a train of illusions produced in him by evil scientists.
157
It is the most profound form of self-contradiction,
158
to be both God and a worm." Jung,
159
however, found out
160
that many people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia actually had ordinary depression as a result of traumas
161
and difficult life experiences that had been repressed.
162
He tells the story of an 18-year-old girl who had been abused at the age of 15.
163
She retreated into isolation and concealed herself from people.
164
She was taken to a mental hospital and remained in a catatonic state.
165
Over the course of many weeks,
166
Jung gradually persuaded her to speak.
167
After overcoming many resistances, she told Jung
168
that she had been living on the moon said that she did not like this world,
169
and that the moon was beautiful and life there was rich in meaning.
170
He writes, as a result of the incest to which she had been subjected as a girl,
171
she felt humiliated in the eyes of the world,
172
but elevated in the realm of fantasy.
173
The consequence was complete alienation from the world, a state of psychosis.
174
She became extra mundane, as it were,
175
and lost contact with humanity.
176
She plunged into cosmic distances,
177
into outer space where she met with a winged demon.
178
By telling me her story,
179
she had in a sense betrayed the demon and attached herself to an earthly human being.
180
Thereafter, I regarded the sufferings of the mentally ill in a different light,
181
for I had gained insight into the richness and importance of the inner experiences.
182
In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger argues that Throughout history,
183
humans have had a strong instinct to belong to small groups or tribes.
184
These tribes gave people a purpose and understanding of life.
185
However, this tribal connection has been obliterated in modern society.
186
During wars with the Indian tribes,
187
many European settlers were taken as prisoners and held within the tribes.
188
After they had a chance to escape and return to their modern society,
189
many refused to do so.
190
They preferred the primitive society over their modern one.
191
On the contrary, not one tribesman wanted to flee to modern society.
192
We have evolved genetically to live in an interdependent group in order to survive,
193
and this creates equality as everyone plays a necessary role in the tribe.
194
They work 12 hours a week to survive,
195
in contrast to the average 40 hours a week that many westernized societies require.
196
The tribes collaborate for survival,
197
each day they go to hunt and gather,
198
and in the evening they return to share the food.
199
People often believe that modern life with all its efficient technology has allowed for more leisure time,
200
however, the exact opposite is true.
201
Modern life is characterised by a desperate cycle of work,
202
financial obligation, and more work, sacrificing personal freedom.
203
One might argue, however, That modernity has allowed for a sense of independence,
204
which primitive man could never have achieved,
205
leading to a sense of freedom,
206
but can also lead to a feeling of alienation and depression.
207
We have not yet been genetically adapted to our environment,
208
the enormous changes of agriculture and the industrial revolution have hardly begun to affect our gene pool.
209
In other words, even though we live in more complex societies,
210
we are still hardwired to be hunter-gatherers.
211
Today, we can be surrounded by a group of people and yet feel completely alone.
212
This is not something we have experienced until quite recently.
213
We are wired to belong to a group where we feel valued by our contributions to it,
214
and without a group, many fall into a sense of meaninglessness.
215
Sociologist Emil Durkheim first noticed the positive effects of war on mental health,
216
the suicide rate, homicide and admission to psych wards drop down.
217
Likewise, in natural disasters, people overwhelmingly devote their energy to the community rather than themselves.
218
Adversity produces pro-social behaviours in which one is likely to abandon his self-interest and sacrifice himself for others,
219
acting as a unified society,
220
sending people back into a more ancient way of life.
221
Modernity has disrupted the social bonds that has always characterised the human experience.
222
It breeds comfort, allowing people to act selfishly.
223
This shows an increase of mental illness In modern society's deep lack of a sense of community,
224
which the tribe had historically provided us,
225
we have much to learn from our ancestors in this regard.
226
The world hangs on a thin thread,
227
and that is the psyche of man.
228
We are the great danger,
229
how important it is to know something about it,
230
but we know nothing about it.
231
Jung warns us that we are pitifully unaware of our unconscious,
232
we have become too rational,
233
and have lost contact with our primitive instincts,
234
leading to a dissociation in the psyche of modern civilization.
235
He writes,
236
ideas has put him at the mercy of the psychic underworld,
237
he has freed himself from superstition or so he believes,
238
but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree,
239
his moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated and he's now paying the price for this breakup in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.
240
The surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements,
241
However, a realistic picture of the human mind reveals many primitive traits
242
which are still playing their role just as if nothing had happened during the last centuries.
243
Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos because he no longer has a deep relation with nature.
244
When a primitive society's spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilisation,
245
its people lose the meaning of their lives,
246
their social organisation disintegrates and and they themselves morally decay.
247
As Ernest Becker writes, anthropologists have long known that
248
when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worthwhile,
249
they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish.
250
Food is not the primary nourishment of man.
251
Unlike primitive man, modern man has lost contact with nature and his relationship with animals and trees through mystical participation.
252
We may have advanced in the outer world,
253
but our inner world is still delicate and fragmentary.
254
A famous fictional example of the modern dissociation is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
255
In the story, Jekyll's split took the form of a physical change,
256
rather than, as in reality, an inner psychic state.
257
Jung writes, we can be possessed and altered by moods,
258
or become unreasonable and unable to recall the important facts about ourselves or others.
259
We talk about being able to control ourselves,
260
but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue.
261
There is a world of difference between a conscious decision to split off and temporarily suppress a part of one's psyche,
262
and a condition in which this happens spontaneously,
263
without one's knowledge or consent and even against one's intention.
264
The former is a civilised achievement,
265
the latter a primitive loss of a soul,
266
or even a pathological cause of a neurosis.
267
In order to heal the split in the psyche,
268
Jung tells us to explore our unconscious through self-reflection and dream journaling.
269
We must understand that there are things within us that are beyond our control,
270
which are autonomous personalities.
271
Here is where we find the vital insights for our lives,
272
and where the primitive aspects that form part of the original mind are preserved as archetypes.
273
Despite our differences, we all share a collective unconscious which adapts itself to the particularities of the individual's life.
274
We have been so busy with the question of what we think,
275
that we entirely forgot to ask what the unconscious psyche thinks about us.
276
I hope you found this video valuable.
277
You can help support the channel on Patreon or by liking,
278
commenting or sharing the content.
Télécharger l'application
Notation IA pour chaque phrase que vous prononcez
TRENDING
Populaires
Context & Background
The video titled "Mental Illness as a Crisis of Meaning in Modern Society" navigates the complex landscape of mental health within the context of contemporary society. The speaker discusses how incredible advancements in science and technology have not necessarily translated into improved mental well-being. Instead, modernity's emphasis on individualism, capitalism, and hedonism has coincided with a notable surge in mental illness, raising questions about societal values and personal identity. The exploration into mental illness highlights a conflict between personal freedom and societal expectations, incorporating philosophical insights from thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre. Understanding these intricacies provides valuable context for learners seeking to refine their English speaking skills through engaging, thematic content.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
Here are five key phrases extracted from the transcript that can enhance your English communication skills:
- "The focus on the value and power of the individual self." - This phrase highlights the importance of individual identity, useful in discussions about personal development.
- "The conditions of modern life are complex and conflicting." - A great way to describe the challenges of contemporary society.
- "We must be responsible for ourselves." - This statement can serve as a personal mantra or as a way to encourage self-ownership in conversations.
- "Mental illness must be viewed in line with modern social structures." - Useful for discussing mental health in the context of societal influences.
- "Condemned to be free." - A thought-provoking phrase to evoke discussions around freedom and responsibility.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively utilize this engaging transcript for english speaking practice, follow these steps for shadow speak:
- Watch the video attentively: Begin by watching the entire video without interruptions. Pay close attention to the speaker's pronunciation and intonation.
- Listen and repeat: Play short segments of the video. Pause after each segment and repeat what you hear, mimicking the speaker's rhythm and pronunciation. This practice can drastically improve your fluency.
- Focus on comprehension: After shadowing, summarize each segment in your own words, ensuring you understand the content. This will help you build both comprehension and vocabulary.
- Practice aloud: Use the extracted phrases in your conversations or practice them alone. This can be an effective means for advanced IELTS speaking practice. Incorporate them into different contexts to gain versatility.
- Engage with others: Pair up with a language partner or join a learning group, discussing the themes of the video using the phrases you learned. This not only aids in retention but helps in applying the language in real-life scenarios.
By using this shadowing approach, learners can significantly enhance their grasp of language nuances while engaging with meaningful content. Explore the wealth of knowledge available in videos like this as you learn English with YouTube and improve your speaking abilities through methodical practice.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.
☕ Offrez-nous un café
ShadowingEnglish reste 100% gratuit grâce à votre soutien. Les coûts des serveurs et de l'IA sont élevés — votre café nous aide à continuer ! 🙏