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Pathogenesis and Identity
The development of the society today may be described in terms of the following structural changes:
a) increased population, which requires other rules of contact for adequate forms of social relationship;
b) urbanization, with people living together in clusters, which, on the one hand, intensifies social relationships, but, on the other, reduces possibilities for real friendships;
c) differentiation, which rests on an increasing technological development and requires specialization in partial functions; and
d) transcultural problems.
With people in the industrialized countries, this somatic-psycho-social relationship finds expression in the famous deadly sins of civilization, the risk factors. The following five factors share in responsibility for the origin and development of psychosocial and psychosomatic diseases, especially the so-called diseases of civilization - alcohol, intoxicants, and drugs; smoking; overweight; sedentariness; and emotional stress (anxiety and inner tensions). These factors are means to cope with an increasing lack of an individual, world and everyday identity development.
Salutogenesis and Identity
The development of identity can be described in three levels:
Identity here is seen as a salutogenetic factor for individuals, family, society and world community, if these three levels are concerned. It plays a central role in transcultural encounter, in religion and ideology, scientific paradigms and individual life. Cooperation and finally world peace can be reached only by understanding values in different individual, group, cultural, religious and world identifications, to understand the motivation for one's behavior. Questions will be put like „who am I, who are we, which tasks have we, where do we go to, what is our identity?“
This entails a further process, namely, the destruction of emotional barriers and prejudices which exist against other ways of thinking and feeling, which cause that which is foreign to be perceived as something aggressive and threatening, and which provoke repulsion / where understanding is called for. Positive family therapy is a comprehensive model of milieu-therapeutic intervention, social- and psychotherapeutic intervention, and self-help activities, concerning the development of identity in the three levels. Furthermore, it opens into areas which are no longer the domain of the therapist, but have political and economic importance, areas which to a large extent together define the social framework of our life together.
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