Армен Мурадян - Male’s Health in the Objective of Stressology – Beyond the Usual

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.