Pollock K
Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, England.
Soc Sci Med. 1988;26(3):381-92. doi: 10.1016/0277-9536(88)90404-2.
In recent decades there has been increasing interest in the subject of stress and a proliferation of research into the contribution of stress as a cause of illness. This association has been widely popularized and now has an established position within the body of popular ideas about health and illness. Nevertheless, very little has been confidently established about the relationship between stress and illness. The precise nature of stress itself eludes definition and there is no consensus as to what it encompasses. There has been a confusion of the models of stress developed in the laboratory and those applied to society. Early laboratory research was modelled on 'mechanical' images of stress taken from contemporary physics and engineering. Since then the stress theory has been heavily psychologised, although it still relies for its validation on the physiological models with which it is fundamentally non-comparable. It is argued that stress is not something naturally occurring in the world, but a manufactured concept which has by now become a 'social fact'. As such it has direct implications for the ways in which people perceive their world and act within it. Stress has increasingly come to be regarded as an integral part of everyday experience. Although much of the attractiveness of the stress theory derives from its seeming to reduce the arbitrariness of suffering, it also carries with it a significant ideological component. This can serve as a means of organising and expressing a variety of ideas about the social order relating, for example, to issues of individual autonomy and responsibility, or to the ways in which society might be perceived as dangerous, repressive or pathogenic.
近几十年来，人们对压力这一主题的兴趣与日俱增，有关压力作为疾病成因的研究也大量涌现。这种关联已得到广泛传播，如今在关于健康与疾病的大众观念体系中占据了一席之地。然而，关于压力与疾病之间的关系，能确切认定的却非常少。压力本身的确切性质难以界定，对于它所涵盖的内容也没有达成共识。实验室中发展出的压力模型与应用于社会的压力模型存在混淆。早期的实验室研究是以当代物理学和工程学中“机械”的压力形象为模型构建的。从那时起，压力理论就严重心理学化了，尽管它仍然依赖于从根本上与之不可比的生理模型来进行验证。有人认为，压力并非世界上自然存在的东西，而是一个人造概念，如今已成为一种“社会事实”。正因如此，它对人们感知世界以及在其中行动的方式有着直接影响。压力越来越被视为日常体验中不可或缺的一部分。尽管压力理论的诸多吸引力源于它似乎减少了苦难的随意性，但它也带有重要的意识形态成分。这可以作为一种组织和表达各种有关社会秩序的观念的方式，例如，涉及个人自主性和责任问题，或者社会可能被视为危险、压抑或致病的方式。
