“Homo sapiens sapientis” is the specific name of the person – acquires a concrete content, which is not to be ignored. There are no pills for longevity; even changing his genome a person is doomed to illness and death in a relatively young age because his life is getting fuller of stress. Anthropogenic psychoemotional stress (APES) is a factor causing an invisible epidemic, about which at the beginning of the last century, psychiatrist Muller-Lier wrote: “… Our science has weighed and measured both the smallest and extremely large… while what is so strongly connected with our flesh and blood, what is closest to us and strongly affects our vital interests – human suffering and disasters – science has punished with complete disregard, blindly passed by them. The fact is so paradoxical that we must be amazed” (Mueller-Lier, F., 1935). While “stress – the child of the brain”, this quiet killer, often choosing the best, carried and carries away thousands of men, earlier than women.
The most striking, and probably the most powerful emotional force of Freud is a passionate love of truth, uncompromising faith in mind. The mind for him was that unique ability that could help solve the problem of human existence, or at least alleviate the suffering inherent in human life. The mind, as Freud felt, is our only instrument, or weapon with which we can get rid of illusions (religious shackles, according to Freud, are only one of them) and give meaning to life, to gain independence from the shackles of foreign power, and thus to install its own power on them. This faith in mind was the basis of his ceaseless quest for the truth – since in the complexity and diversity of the observed phenomena he opened a theoretical truth. Even if the results seemed absurd from the point of view of common sense, it did not bother Freud.. This belief in the power of mind proves that Freud was the son of the Enlightenment, the motto of which – “Sapere aude” (“Dare to know”) – fully identified both a person of Freud and his work.
EVOLUTION OF ADAPTATION AND
ITS SPECIFICITY IN HUMAN
The system of biological adaptation (SBA)
The system of psychosocial adaptation (SPA)
The system of biological adaptation (SBA). Adaptation – is the basic function of human life support, functioning and development. The mechanism of adaptation was discovered in the middle of the last century by H. Selye who named it “general adaptation syndrome” (GAS), which is an endocrine and humoral regulation of human psychophysiological state in response to changes in the environment. It is caused by a single mechanism, let’s call it “stressogenesis”, which is genetically programmed and passed from generation to generation.
This kind of adaptation is inherent in all living beings as a mechanism for implementation of self-preservation instinct and provided by a biological adaptation system (BAS). GAS can be considered an algorithm of the system which provides personality adaptation at the level of the body and actually performs adaptation of the body to the environment. According to Selye, it consists of two groups of effects: specific and non-specific psychosomatic effects.
This division is conventional, since the response symptoms is an interlacing of the non-specific with the specific. The non-specific stereotypical effects result from the activation of neural and humoral axes manifested through the GAS. According to H. Selye, stressogenesis is specific because of its psychosomatic response to the stressor which is a three-phase process: alarm reaction (A-R); stage of resistance – strain (S-R), and stage of exhaustion – asthenization (S-E). The body’s adaptation capabilities are limited, since it is all about the biological adaptation having quite rigid borders. It supports the first basic level of adapting a living organism to changing environment, that process being relatively passive: variation – alarm (first phase of GAS) – adaptation.
Example: A training session is under way. The audience is in a session situation, their attention, thinking and behavior are adequate to the situation. Besides getting situational information, the audience can also perceive background sensory stimulants having no adverse effects. Suddenly there is a clatter. All those present momentarily turn their heads towards the sound, half-rise, with a question on their face, bodies strained, eyes opened wide. This phase of alarm is estimating. In case the estimated situation suggests no threat, the stressor response is terminating at this phase and the audience laughing and joking (relaxation) return to the previous condition resuming training session. In case the situation is estimated as threatening (earthquake, hurricane, attack), everyone goes on the move, the behavior switches to rescue (“flight” or “fight”, according to Cannon).
The phase of alarm is realized automatically through the sympatho-parasympathetic neural axes. Anxiety is a bioelectric effect, so it is instant and unconscious. If the situation is threatening, the second phase of stressor reaction – phase of resistance or strain is developing. It is provided by endocrine-hormonal system which throws out stress hormones into the blood stream leading to effects in different organ-systems. This phase is multistep and multilevel. Each level is maintained by a successive introduction of hormonal axes: the adrenocortical, then the somatotropic and the latest – the thyroid. Stress hormones are associated with the concept of “adaptation energy” by Selye. Numerous investigations of biological adaptation have shown that a stressor reaction has an impulsive, intermittent nature, each time followed by relaxation. As a result, the third phase – the phase of asthenization develops. According to “adaptation energy” by Selye, long-time effect of any stressor will sooner or later inevitably result in losing the “adaptation force – energy”, or to its depletion. Adaptation energy always has a quantitative limit and each organism possesses a genetically inherited stock, expended through the lifetime, which can be considered as a component of individual stress resistance. This stock can be used rapidly or slowly. Depletion of adaptation stock of energy will result in ageing or death.
The model of stressor response includes the concept of “end organ” assuming any organ terminating the stressor response. “Anxiety made my head ache”; “The screaming boss made my colleague catch hold of his heart”; “The mere look of his body made me barf my guts”; “The mere recollection of my blunder makes me go into sweat and color”; “The mere voice of my mother-in-law makes me shake, I want to ruin everything…”, “My pressure is perhaps my daughter-in-law”.
These are examples of individual preference of an organ in a stressful situation, each person mostly having his own end stressor organ. The resulted somatic effects are a manifestation of activation of the SBA.
The system of psychosocial adaptation – SPA. Man is not merely a living organism: he has consciousness and speech, imagination and thinking. He has a unique ability to retain memories and re-live them again and again as if they were for the first time. Only man is able to endure a lot in the name of “something”, to wait and to hope for the future, while predicting its alternatives. Only man can develop the integrity of his life from the past, through the present, and into the future. Only man seeks meaning in everything: in objects, in physical phenomena, in facial expression, in words and deeds of other people. He is in a permanent whirlpool of physical life, in interaction with himself and his own kind. All this variety of factors and conditions places high demands on the system of adaptation and will naturally entail a need for improving and developing a new system of adaptation.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the biologically-oriented science has gradually initiated a psychological trend revealing the essence of man’s psychosocial adaptation using psycho-analysis founded by S. Freud. It was psychoanalysis that gave in-depth approaches, psychological insights to understanding what is happening in the psychic sphere, having discovered numerous mechanisms of psychological defense. According to Freud, after restoring the balance at the level of the body, man recovers his most complicated extra- and intrapsychic balance. The latter consists of the balance within a social environment with people, the balance of instinctive inclinations and the psycho-social instances that restrain them (vitally essential balance). Then man recovers the balances between the psychic instances themselves, balances of the synthetic functions of “Ego” itself as a specific adaptive apparatus of the individual. That is what comprises the system of psychological adaptation. Thus, man possesses two types of adaptation: the biological type responsible for adaptation of the body and psychological type which adapts personality. All intrapsychic processes are interrelated, dependent and interdependent by the biological adaptation system, but not only.
A metaphoric model of human adaptation.
SBA is the basis of adaptation depicted as “a dark column trunk” with three-phase branching because it has genetically programmed relatively rigid boundaries that limit the variability of adaptive possibilities. A variety of colored balls represents the SPA.
Psychosocial adaptation is flexible, dynamic; it has a large selection of freedoms due to psychological defense mechanisms, dissociation. SPA is multidimensional, it tends to develop; according to the emerging challenges becomes more complicated, separates from its basis, gives rise to derived forms that somehow remain dependent on the biological adaptation. One can consider the ever-expanding Universe of our adaptation, in proportion with the expanding spheres of life, communication, and with man’s perception of all things and his “Ego”. Moreover, human adaptation is distinguished by an active volitional conscious process that can get more complex with the change of the environment, with complication of arising assignments and their solutions, and stress-saturation. In the course of evolution, the stereotypes of reactions that arose once in a person based on instinctive reactions to stimuli (adaptation) were replaced by increasingly complex psychic acts. The latter in repetitive situations allowed to change the modes of response, thereby increasing the degrees of freedom of reaction. Therefore the adaptation of man with its active and passive components has to be clearly distinguished from accomodation. The latter is in fact a passive autoplastic process materialized through the system of biological adaptation with its basic mechanism – a three-phase stressogenesis, which restores the balance between the body and the environment as the first level of adaptation, as Freud (1931) and Alexander (1933) wrote in their time.
The GAS, being a psycho-physiological response to a changing environment at the very elementary level – anxiety phase is complex and caused by a unity of mental and physical in man. This phenomenon is already complicated as contains both a mental component – emotion (alarm) and a bodily one (variety of somatovegetational effects). Therefore understanding what is going on with man and in man is possible only through the prism of “correlations of the physiological and the mental, the biological and the social in the nature of man”. Actually we deal with the “intertransition” of the psychosocial into the biological and vice versa. This problem has long been under scientists’ close scrutiny, and its differing interpretations have long been a stage of fierce disputes. Some psychologists and biologists refer to this trend as “psychophysiological parallelism”. Thus, W. Wundt, a German psychologist, physiologist and philosopher, the founder of experimental psychology, as far back as 1874 in one of his most important works in the history of psychology, the book “Principles of Physiological Psychology” thought that physiological research was unable to penetrate into the mystery of the psyche because the psychic processes developed in parallel with the biological and were not determined by the latter. The complexity is primarily in both understanding the concept of the “psychic” and its inaccessibility to direct experiment, direct sensual observation. And a German physiologist E. Du Bois-Reymond in one of his lectures, “On the limits of science” – at the second session of the 45th Congress of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in 1873 suggested that the emergence of psychic phenomena was one of the seven fundamentally unsolvable mysteries of the world. Since then, much has changed.
Emergence of the principle of systemic activity of the nervous system, which replaced the previous three: the principle of reflex (R. Descartes, I. Sechenov, I. Pavlov), the principle of dominant (A. Ukhtomsky), the principle of reflection in understanding the brain activity, resulted in abandoning the notion of the role of the brain as an anatomical organ. For this purpose, it was necessary to abandon monocausalgia to interpret mental and behavioral paradigms. In view of polyetiology, psychic manifestations began to be treated as a consequence of exposure to more than one factor, rather to a sum of factors; and not simply a sum, but as a result of their specific interaction.
Gunthern von Hagens (2009), trying to embrace an individual in a holistic systemic concept on the one hand, describes different levels of the body – physiological, cognitive, emotional and transactional, and on the other hand, he can see man as part of the socio-cultural field. Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist, known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). It is an interdisciplinary practice, which describes systems with interacting components used in biology, cybernetics and other areas. Von Bertalanffy (1973) suggested a concept of hierarchal orders to describe the body of man, wherein the simpler systems (e.g. cells) were integrated into more complex systems (e.g. organs) as elements or subsystems. As to the organs, they were included as elements or subsystems in even more complicated systems, like organisms, which on the next hierarchical level again interacted with the environment forming social systems. This viewpoint brings into the foreground a thesis by V. Ehrenfels (1890) that the whole (in this case, it is a system) is more than the sum of its parts (subsystems). It is all about the Gestalt psychology. The idea of Gestalt has its roots in the theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernst Mach. The concept of Gestalt was first introduced in contemporary philosophy and psychology by Christian von Ehrenfels in his famous work “Über Gestaltqualitäten (1890). With the increase in the complexity of the system, new qualities appear that have not yet existed at the level of the subsystem; psychosocial adaptation becomes such a quality.
I. M. Sechenov, A. A. Ukhtomsky, P. K. Anokhin, N. A. Bernstein, each from his own position, have made a weighty contribution into the development of living systems. As noted by Yu. Alexandrovsky, by virtue of systemic analysis, “…which is a specific logical and methodological instrument for studying different complex processes, it becomes possible to explain the mechanism of qualitatively new features of the whole (system)…” (2004).