介绍:
Condemned to meaning: we would much prefer to be saddled with a harmful and negative meaning than to have no meaning at all. And so whenever illness strikes, society is on hand with a huge supply of ready-made meanings and judgements through which the individual seeks to understand his or her sickness. And when that society is in fact ignorant of the true cause of an illness, this ignorance ususally breeds fear, which in turn breeds negative judgments about the character of the person unlucky enough to come down with the illness. The person is not only ill but sick, and this sickness, defined by society’s judgments, all too often becomes a self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing prophecy: Why me? Why am I sick? Because you’ve been bad. But how do you know I’ve been bad? Because you’re sick.
In short, the less the actual medical causes of an illness are understood, then the more it tends to become a sickness surrounded by desultory myths and metaphors; the more it tends to be treated as a sickeness due to character weakness or moral flaws of the afflicted individual; the more it is misunderstood as sickness of the soul, a personality defect, a moral infirmity.
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