Aaron Antonovsky

Aaron Antonovsky (born December 19, 1923 in Brooklyn , New York City , NY , USA ; † July 7, 1994 in Be'er Scheva , Israel ) was an Israeli - American sociologist and professor of sociology . He is considered to be the "father of salutogenesis, " a concept that defines health.

Career

Antonovsky served on the Allied side in the US Army during World War II . After his military service, he began studying sociology, which he completed with a doctorate . In 1960 he emigrated to Jerusalem , Israel with his wife Helen .

During his time at the Applied Social Research Institute, Antonovsky was engaged in studies of women born in Central Europe between 1914 and 1923. Some of them were concentration camp survivors . He noticed that 29% of the women who had been interned saw themselves in a good mental state despite the extreme stressors to which they were exposed during their life. This led him to the question of what keeps people healthy, from which ultimately the concept of salutogenesis emerged . Antonovsky developed the concept of salutogenesis during the 1970s and attracted a lot of attention in 1979 with the publication of his book Health, stress, and coping .

Salutogenesis

→ Main article : Salutogenesis

The salutogenetic approach, according to which health is not a passive state of equilibrium ( homeostasis ) but an active occurrence ( heterostasis ), in contrast to pathogenesis, does not deal with the question "Why does a person get sick", but rather with the question: "What keeps him healthy. ”At the very beginning of his research, Antonovsky was pretty much alone in the academic world with his approach. But Antonovsky or salutogenesis does not rule out pathogenesis, but uses it as a resource for health.

For Antonovsky, man is constantly moving on a continuum between the extreme poles of total health and illness. So that the relationship between the two variables is in equilibrium or perhaps even more in the direction of “health”, he uses various resources available to him. This is how Antonovsky defined the term “Sense of Coherence” (SOC), in English “Sense of Coherence”, which describes a person's ability to use the resources offered to them in order to keep themselves healthy. These resources can be very different depending on the social environment and environment. Now, according to Antonovsky, the SOC comes into play, because the question now arises why two people who are exposed to the same stress and have the same resources at their disposal nevertheless react so fundamentally differently. One person gets sick, the other stays healthy. Antonovsky concludes that the SOC of both people is different.

Antonovsky referred in his research in particular to the psychosomatic and psychosocial level. Over the decades, Antonovsky's approach became more and more versatile and was taken up by many professors. Salutogenesis is now an integral part of many disciplines such as sociology, psychology, health and sports sciences.

Fonts (selection)

• Health, stress, and coping. New perspectives on mental and physical well-being , San Francisco 1979.
• Unraveling the mystery of health. How people manage stress and stay well. , San Francisco 1987.
• Salutogenesis. To demystify health. Extended German edition by Alexa Franke, dgvt-Verlag, Tübingen 1997. ISBN 978-3-87159-136-5 .

literature

• Concept of salutogenesis according to Aaron Antonovsky. GRIN Verlag 2007. ISBN 978-3638849494
• Rainer Tameling. The model of salutogenesis by Aaron Antonovsky. Independently published 2018. ISBN 978-1976935503
• Rainer Tameling. The cognitive-phenomenological concept of coping with stress by Richard S. Lazarus and the health concept of salutogenesis by Aaron Antonovsky. Independently published 2018. ISBN 978-1977018786

Web links

• Literature by and about Aaron Antonovsky in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by Aaron Antonovsky at WorldCat
• biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1]
2. ↑ Klaus Hurrelmann u. a .: Handbook of Health Sciences. Juventa, Weinheim / Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-7799-0790-9 .