ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the notion of social pathology and considers sociological transfiguration as a narrative, which shows tensions specific to American individualism. Before being a philosophical or psychological concept, the self is a specifically American anthropological category, at least if one compares the US and France where there no such thing as a self, a category whose origins are social. The unhappiness of Narcissus is a narrative about the loss of the substance of life in common which undermines both the individual and society. Neurasthenia inaugurated the tradition of social pathology. This topic is related to the widespread and very confusing idea in the social sciences and philosophy that there is a double process of psychologization resulting from a weakening of social links. The concept of collective personality has opened a space of exchange between psychoanalysis and sociology, actually a space that is a sort of a division of labor: psychoanalysis being about individual psychology and sociology about collective psychology.
