Conflicts, Stresses and Psychoneuroses
The majority of the mentally retarded, as well as those with psychopathic mental structure, do not experience inner conflicts, though they are often involved in external conflicts.
Disappointments, suffering, inner conflicts, breakdowns, force one to depart from peaceful adjustment to automatic activities such as daily routine, pursuit of money, pleasures of eating, primitive joys, or superficial, easily resolved conflicts.
Frustrations and inner conflicts change one’s relationship to the ordinary, everyday, narrow reality and lead away from it. They provoke the rise of different emotions to more refined and empathically transformed levels. Under such conditions different needs appear, different issues have to be resolved; new stimuli arouse emotional responses different from those existing till then, different from those associated with needs common with a group. The interests and experiences of the individual become much more exclusive, unique, unrepeatable, much more complex and controversial. Previously they were infrequent and on the side now they become the main component of his life.
With respect to the psychic developmental potential, we are dealing apparently with three phenomena which are three aspects of one process.
First, psychic hyperexcitability, general or more differentiated (emotional, psychomotor, intellectual) provokes conflicts, disappointments, suffering in family life, in school, in professional life, in short, leads to conflicts with the external environment. Hyperexcitability also provokes inner conflicts as well as the means by which these conflicts can be overcome. Second, hyperexcitability precipitates psychoneurotic processes, and third, conflicts and psychoneurotic processes become the dominant factor in accelerated development.
One of the elements, arising from the collision of the developmental (i.e. the potential for disintegration and psychoneurosis) with the external environment and one’s own stereotypes is frustration. We are accustomed to believe that frustration is a negative factor in development, detrimental to the individual and to the group. However, it is our opinion that this interpretation is erroneous.
It is clear to us that continuous frustration without the corresponding development of inner psychic transformation, self-awareness and self-control will have a negative outcome. However, the development of these factors which are important dynamisms of the inner psychic milieu makes positive use of frustrations. If developmental dynamisms are very strong the frustrations can be very intense. Thus suffering, maladjustment and even some forms of breakdown are necessary events in development.
It seems odd to us that a high threshold of frustration tolerance should be considered positive for development. In our opinion, such a viewpoint is not accurate. High frustration tolerance is characteristic of psychopaths, of the mentally retarded and individuals characterized by very primitive development. On the contrary, in our opinion, a low threshold of tolerance to frustration characterizes sensitive, subtle, and creative people, those who manifest “contact introversion”.*
It is deeply human to experience one’s own affliction and to empathize with that of others. This capacity always depends on lox or medium threshold of frustration tolerance.
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*Contact introversion is this type of introversion wherein exist certain traits of syntony allowing a mental contact with others. This shows a certain slant of the introvert type towards extraversion