Social Symptoms: Moral Panics and Mass Hysteria

The standard narrative of modernity is one of enlightenment, interconnection, and progress. From the ascent of liberal democracies to the professionalization of medicine, from the development of the scientific method to the proliferation of mass media, modernity, the story goes, involves inexorable advances in rationality, bureaucracy, and efficiency. Yet this trajectory has regularly been upended by spasms of collective irrationality, breakdown, and florid behavior, outbursts that have defy modernity’s neat distinctions between mind and body, individuals and groups, communication and contagion. From literal witch-hunts that targeted women and men supposedly in league with Satan to figurative ones waged against “brainwashed” Communist infiltrators, from nineteenth century worries over the Madness of Crowds to twentieth century panics over Satanic Ritual Abuse, large populations have repeatedly mobilized into destructive campaigns against the specter of threatening Others within. What are we to make of such episodes? How do authorities respond, and how do institutions of mainstream knowledge production adjudicate the claims of the people caught up in them? And what insights can we gain about modernity, and even our ostensibly shared experiences of objective reality, if we bracket making definitive diagnostic judgements, refuse to gainsay the suffering of anyone involved, and consider such phenomena as “social symptoms?”

In this course, we will take up these questions and more, surveying theoretical perspectives from the disciplines of social psychology, sociology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Considering an array of historical and contemporary case studies—including UFO “flaps,” the discourse of Gangstalking/Targeted Individuals, Havana Syndrome, and others—we will consider how episodes of moral panics and sociogenic illness reflect the specific material conditions of their moments while also probing how they implicate broader fantasies and recurrent anxieties about power, technology, gender, and more. In addition to primary source material, we will read works by figures including Charles Mackay, Gustave Le Bon, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, Stanley Cohen, Jonathan Metzl, Sylvia Federici, and others.