L’epoca della vulnerabilità. Come la psicologia ha invaso le nostre vite

In the last century, the invasion of psychology into everyday life has reached staggering proportions: in the United States, psychologists are now twice as numerous as dentists and pharmacists, more numerous than postmen. The affirmation of the therapeutic culture that conceives of man as a fundamentally pathological being, constitutively fragile, culminates in the digital age in the figure of the ‘Homo vulnerabilis’, an individual perpetually in crisis, in constant need of care and therapy to cope with life that becomes a ‘burden’. The healthy person is but a person awaiting evaluation. In the age of vulnerability, language is pervaded by the typical locutions of psychology; the terms ‘anxiety’, ‘stress’, ‘trauma’ leave the clinical jargon to become the common words that accompany the everyday life of the common man. The sphere of the pathological is inexorably widening: today we are all vulnerable, and the web is the great consulting room where fragility can be exhibited – and ultimately, commodified. But this fetishism of fragility – this overexposure of vulnerability – hides more pitfalls than promises, and does not lead to any improvement in living conditions. Psychological malaise, by its very nature individual and private, is confused and spreads in the conformism and homologation with which it is described today: if we are all fragile, all potentially sick, then no one is really sick.