1 Psychiatric Times Home page teaser: Society starts with two – one is a fiction. Column: Second Thoughts Link: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/terms-of-the-social-updating-the-lexicon-of- social-psychiatry Terms of the Social: Updating the Lexicon of Social Psychiatry June 5, 2024 Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS, DLFAPA, DFCPA The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” ― Tony Kushner 1 This column on “Second thoughts about psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy” will focus for the next 18 months, the rest of my term as President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP), on social psychiatry. In a series of essays, I will offer an updated lexicon for social psychiatry, interspersed with related reflections. “Terms of the Social” covers the words social and society; the complex history of social class and socialism; the terms sociopetal and sociofugal from socio-architecture, coined by British-Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, MD, and the related social space from American anthropologist Edward Hall’s proxemics; how to understand the social sciences from sociology to social psychology to social work, and such philosophical-clinical notions as R.D. Laing, MD’s social phenomenology and social construction versus social constructivism in understanding social reality as part of social philosophy; and, finally, the place of social psychiatry in all of this.