Alloplastic adaptation - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Alloplastic adaptation is a form of adaptation

Adaptation

An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....

where the subject attempts to change the environment when faced with a difficult situation. Criminality, mental illness

Mental illness

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...

, and activism

Activism

Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...

can all be classified as categories of alloplastic adaptation.

The concept of alloplastic adaptation was developed by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Sándor Ferenczi

Sándor Ferenczi

Sándor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.-Biography:...

, and Franz Alexander

Franz Alexander

Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.- Life :...

. They proposed that when an individual was presented with a stressful situation, he could react in one of two ways:

Autoplastic adaptation
Autoplastic adaptation
Autoplastic adaptation is a form of adaptation where the subject attempts to change itself when faced with a difficult situation....

: The subject tries to change himself, i.e. the internal environment.
Alloplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change the situation, i.e. the external environment.

Origins and development

'These terms are possibly due to Ferenczi, who used them in a paper on "The Phenomenon of Hysterical Materialization" (1919,24). But he there appears to attribute them to Freud' (who may have used them previously in private correspondence or conversation). Ferenczi linked 'the purely "autoplastic" tricks of the hysteric...[to] the bodily performances of "artists" and actors'.

Freud's only public use of the terms was in his paper "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis" (1924), where he points out that 'expedient, normal behaviour leads to work being carried out on the external world; it does not stop, as in psychosis, at effecting internal changes. It is no longer autoplastic but alloplastic '.

A few years later, in his paper on "The Neurotic Character" (1930), Alexander described 'a type of neurosis in which...the patient's entire life consists of actions not adapted to reality but rather aimed at relieving unconscious tensions'. Alexander considered that 'neurotic characters of this type are more easily accessible to psychoanalysis than patients with symptom neuroses...[due] to the fact that in the latter the patient has regresssed from alloplasticity to autoplasticity; after successful analysis he must pluck up courage to take action in real life'.

Otto Fenichel

Otto Fenichel

Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation".Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud...

however took issue with Alexander on this point, maintaining that 'The pseudo-alloplastic attitude of the neurotic character cannot be changed into a healthy alloplastic one except by first being transformed, for a time, into a neurotic autoplastic attitude, which can then be treated like an ordinary symptom neurosis'.

Human evolution

Alloplasticity has also been used to describe humanity's cultural "evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

". Man's 'evolution by culture...is through alloplastic experiment with objects outside his own body....Unlike autoplastic experiments, alloplastic ones are both replicable and reversible'.

In particular, 'advanced technological societies...are generally characterized by "alloplastic" relations with the environment, involving the manipulation of the environment itself'.

External links

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