The Social Bond and the Person. Toward a Clinical Sociology

Con­tem­po­rary soci­olo­gies often defines them­selves as “actor-cen­tered” soci­olo­gies. In them, soci­ety appears less as a real­i­ty sui gener­is that con­strains the indi­vid­u­als than as some­thing con­struct­ed day-by-day by the var­i­ous social actors. But who are these actors? In what way are the human beings actors? That is a ques­tion that is hard­ly ever asked. The fact that human beings must be endowed with a capac­i­ty for social action, a capac­i­ty for his­toric­i­ty or, in oth­er words, a capac­i­ty to be the actors or authors of their own his­to­ries, is one of the major pos­tu­lates of con­tem­po­rary soci­ol­o­gy. How­ev­er, it is pos­si­ble to go beyond this pos­tu­late and attempt to account for what it is that makes human beings capa­ble of his­toric­i­ty. Because this is not self-evi­dent. A cer­tain num­ber of patholo­gies, both in the psy­chi­atric and the neu­ro­log­i­cal fields, seem to affect this abil­i­ty of humans to be the authors of their own his­to­ry as actors and poten­tial inter­locu­tors in a rela­tion­ship with oth­ers. This, at least, is the hypoth­e­sis pro­posed by Jean Gag­ne­pain which has gath­ered sup­port from clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence and has result­ed in the con­cept of “per­son”. As Gag­ne­pain explains, if a human being is a social actor who is capa­ble of his­toric­i­ty then it is first and fore­most because he or she is a per­son. By this, he means that humans pos­sess a spe­cif­ic men­tal capac­i­ty to cre­ate social bonds, the func­tion­ing of which is par­tial­ly revealed through the clin­i­cal study of per­ver­sions and psy­choses as well as of cer­tain cere­bral lesions. The aim of the present book is to sum­ma­rize and assess our cur­rent knowl­edge of the per­son under­stood in this sense. Though writ­ten by a sin­gle author, it is under­pinned by the work per­formed by an entire team, most of whose mem­bers were tutored direct­ly by Jean Gag­ne­pain him­self.

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