DAWN STEWART BSC, MPA, PHD

BRS 214Introduction to Psychology

Pathological Development of Human Beings

Introduction to Psychology

There is a tremendous consensus in the scientific community about when life begins.  This is hardly controversial.  If the claim were made that life was discovered on another planet, for example, there are well-defined criteria to which we could refer to conclusively determine whether the claim was accurate.  How do scientists distinguish between life and non-life?

Introduction to Psychology

“Basics of Biology” gives five characteristics of living

Things:

1. Living things are highly organized.2. All living things have an ability to acquire

materials and energy.3. All living things have an ability to respond to

their environment.4. All living things have an ability to reproduce.5. All living things have an ability to adapt.

Introduction to Psychology

According to this elementary definition of life:- Life begins at fertilization, when a sperm

unites with an oocyte.  From this moment, the being is highly organized, has the ability to acquire materials and energy, has the ability to respond to his or her environment, has the ability to adapt, and has the ability to reproduce (the cells divide, then divide again, etc., and barring pathology and pending reproductive maturity has the potential to reproduce other members of the species). 

- Non-living things do not do these things. 

Introduction to Psychology

A human being is a member of the species homo sapiens.  Human beings are products of conception, which

is when a human male sperm unites with a human female oocyte (egg). When humans procreate, they don’t make non-humans like slugs, monkeys, cactuses, bacteria, or any such thing. Genetically, a new human being comes into

existencefrom the earliest moment of conception.

Introduction to Psychology

- At the average time when a woman is aware that she is pregnant (the fifth to sixth week after conception), the preborn human being living inside her ismetabolizing nutrition, excreting waste, moving, sucking his or her thumb, growing, and doing many other things that non-living things just do not do.

- As early as 21 days after conception, the baby’s heart has begun to beat his or her own unique blood-type, often different than the mother’s.

Introduction to Psychology

Pathology is at the source of all questioning concerned with life. It's only on the basis of suffering and distress, which are the signs of illness, that every question regarding life, or what living human beings consider normal at a given stage of their history, and the conditions under which such a state can be maintained, becomes possible.

Introduction to Psychology

The development of human personality begins as process of organization of the original instinctive tendencies into instincts, which in contact with objects calling out some response result finally in the instinctive action.

This process marks the first stage in the growth of character. The instincts are not uniformly developed action systems nor do they begin to function simultaneously.

Introduction to Psychology

Another difference between them is that they vary widely in their urge to action, or in other words, they require stimuli of differing intensities.

The instincts of feeding, flight, locomotion, and curiosity may be considered as appearing relatively early, while the instincts of gregariousness and sex among others may be looked upon as comparatively very powerful in function.

The normality of a person is a function of the harmony of his component action elements, and the efficiency of the person depends upon how well the particular combination of action systems fit in with the environmental conditions.

Any serious misfit between the equipment of the personality and the surroundings may mean a disorganization of the action propensities, which may result in maladjustment to the environment.

Pathological personalities may be due to imperfect development of the psycho-physical tendencies. In such case, the individual is not fitted with a series of organized action propensities, which enable him to adapt himself to his surroundings.

We have here a predisposition to forego the ordinary experiences which human individuals enjoy, and this marks an original failure of the mental and behavioristic tendencies to so group themselves as to allow normal responses.

Such a condition indicates not only a defect of immediate adjustment, but must result in a failure on the part of the individual to develop any considerable degree of intelligence.

The facts of pathological personalities offer numerous warnings against considering them as definite fixed kinds of defects. Any of the types may be affected in several different ways.

The classifications of defects which have been made are approximations to actual conditions and serve to illustrate the fundamental hypothesis concerning the nature of human disintegrations, which have been known as mental diseases

The study of human personality and its defects also indicates in a decisive way that the dispositions to actions as components of personality are not metaphysical entities.

They are not existing potential acts, but represent such modifications in the mental and bodily aspects of individual organization as to result in a specific act under certain definite conditions of stimulation.

This is a point which unfortunately has been overlooked by otherwise successful students of human behavior.

Introduction to Psychology

Virtually all psychoanalytic theories have accepted a metaphor for psychic growth which has been borrowed from biology:

Growth is defined as movement through progressive levels of structural differentiation and complexity.

This metaphor is manifest in Freud's notion that psychic growth (and health) involves the differentiation of an ego, structurally separate from the id, and later a superego, precipitated out from the ego.

Introduction to Psychology

Repression is the key element in the creation of endopsychic structure, because it is the mechanism by which the self becomes split. Experience which is integrable into the self results simply in memory or in the gradual alteration of the nature of the self as a whole. It is only when such experience is unintegrable --when it is so intolerable as not to permit of consciousness (which after all, is that which is "knowable together", i.e. integrable)-- that it must be subjected to repression.