Aaron Antonovsky’s Development of Salutogenesis, 1979–1994

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors present a summary of Aaron Antonovsky’s development of the salutogenic model of health (SMH), along with life events of Antonovsky until his untimely death in 1994. The chapter is based on the authorship of Antonovsky himself. Papers written in his last years, in which he looks back and comments on how his thinking developed, have been of particular value. These papers come in addition to the publications in which he originally introduced his ideas. In the SMH, there are important concepts, the development of which we trace in this chapter: stress, breakdown, resources, sense of coherence (SOC), and health. While no summary can replace the value of Antonovsky’s voluminous productivity on salutogenesis, the reader of this chapter will receive a quite in-depth introduction to Salutogenesis’s main lines of development under the guiding hands of its founding theoretician.