Deprivation

Deprivation is the deprivation of a person of those circumstances of life to which a person has become accustomed since childhood, as vital, as well as the state of a person when it is impossible to satisfy such vital needs.

The English verb to deprive means to deprive, take away, take away, and with a strong negative accent — when they mean not just to take away, but to deprive of something important, valuable, necessary.

Food deprivation — forced starvation, motor deprivation — deprivation of the ability to move, etc. When psychologists talk about deprivation, they most often mean the lack of sensory and social stimuli, the deprivation of a person of social contacts and live impressions.

The impact of deprivation on adults

Deprivation of deprivation is different. If the deprivation of the opportunity to use a mobile phone does not harm health, then prolonged sleep deprivation is really dangerous for health. A forced reduction in sleep compared to the norm necessary for a given person causes a decrease in rational, volitional control over one’s thought processes, a loss of criticality in relation to perceived external stimuli, and the occurrence of visual and auditory hallucinations. Sleep deprivation used to be often used in prisons against prisoners until it was officially recognized as torture and became prohibited.

For an ordinary person, almost any deprivation is a nuisance. No one wants to suddenly be deprived of food, sleep, the ability to move and other vital things that we are used to. Deprivation is deprivation, and if this senseless deprivation brings anxiety, people experience deprivation hard.

This was especially evident in experiments on sensory deprivation. In the middle of the 3th century, researchers from the American McGill University suggested that volunteers stay as long as possible in a special chamber, where they were protected from external stimuli as much as possible. The subjects were in a supine position in a small closed room; all sounds were covered by the monotonous hum of the air conditioning motor; the subjects’ hands were inserted into cardboard sleeves, and darkened glasses let in only a weak diffused light. For staying in this state, a fairly decent time wage was due. It would seem — lie to yourself in complete peace and count how, without any effort on your part, your wallet is filled. Scientists were struck by the fact that most of the subjects were unable to withstand such conditions for more than XNUMX days. What’s the matter?

Consciousness, deprived of the usual external stimulation, was forced to turn «inward», and from there the most bizarre, incredible images and pseudo-sensations began to emerge, which could not be defined otherwise than as hallucinations. The subjects themselves did not find anything pleasant in this, they were even frightened by these experiences and demanded to stop the experiment. From this, scientists concluded that sensory stimulation is vital for the normal functioning of consciousness, and sensory deprivation is a sure way to the degradation of thought processes and the personality itself.

Impaired memory, attention and thinking, disruption of the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, anxiety, abrupt mood swings from depression to euphoria and back, inability to distinguish reality from frequent hallucinations — all this was described as the inevitable consequences of sensory deprivation. This began to be widely written in popular literature, almost everyone believed it.

Later it turned out that everything is more complicated and interesting.

Everything is determined not by the fact of deprivation, but by the attitude of a person to this fact. In itself, deprivation is not terrible for an adult — it is just a change in environmental conditions, and the human body can adapt to this by restructuring its functioning. Food deprivation is not necessarily accompanied by suffering, only those who are not used to it and for whom this is a violent procedure begin to suffer from starvation. Those who consciously practice therapeutic fasting know that already on the third day a feeling of lightness arises in the body, and prepared people can easily endure even a ten-day fast.

The same goes for sensory deprivation. Scientist John Lilly tested the effect of sensory deprivation on himself, even under even more complicated conditions. He was in an impenetrable chamber, where he was immersed in a saline solution with a temperature close to body temperature, so that he was deprived of even temperature and gravity sensations. Naturally, bizarre images and unexpected pseudo-sensations began to emerge, as did the subjects at McGill University. However, Lilly approached his feelings with a different attitude. In his opinion, discomfort arises due to the fact that a person perceives illusions and hallucinations as something pathological, and therefore is frightened of them and seeks to return to a normal state of consciousness. And for John Lilly, these were just studies, he studied with interest the images and sensations that appeared in him, as a result of which he did not experience any discomfort during sensory deprivation. Moreover, he liked it so much that he began to immerse himself in these sensations and fantasies, stimulating their emergence with drugs. Actually, on the basis of these fantasies of his, the foundation of transpersonal psychology, set out in S. Grof’s book «Journey in Search of Yourself», was largely built.

The impact of deprivation on child development

Prolonged deprivation in a child’s life retards his development. The lack of sensory and social stimuli in the developmental process of the child leads to a slowdown and distortion of the emotional and intellectual development of the child. This phenomenon was described by Y. A. Comenius, later by J. Itard (teacher of the “wild boy from Aveyron”), in the 40th century. — A. Gesell, who analyzed modern attempts to raise children, due to extreme circumstances, for a long time cut off from society. Acquired worldwide fame held in the 3s. XNUMXth century studies of children in adverse conditions of residential institutions (J. Bowlby, R. Spitz). According to Langmeyer and Mateychek (J. Langmeyer, Z. Mateychek «Psychic deprivation in childhood»), for the full development of the child, it is necessary:

1. Diverse stimuli of different modality (visual, auditory, etc.), their lack causes stimulus (sensory) deprivation.
2. Satisfactory conditions for learning and acquiring various skills; the chaotic structure of the external environment, which makes it impossible to understand, anticipate and regulate what is happening from the outside, causes cognitive deprivation.
3. Social contacts (with adults, primarily with the mother), which ensure the formation of personality, their lack leads to emotional deprivation.
4. The possibility of social self-realization through the assimilation of social roles, familiarization with social goals and values; limiting this opportunity causes social deprivation.

The pronounced effect of slowing down and distorting the development of children due to one form or another of deprivation is called hospitalism.

On the other hand, some forms of deprivation may be more useful for children, since not all living experiences help their growth and maturation, not every social environment works to introduce a child to high culture. There are observations that a long-term (from one to two years) illness of a child in the period from 10 to 14 years contributed to the development and maturation of the child, since it protected from empty chatter and stupid, and even dangerous hobbies, common in secondary schools in all respects. The opportunity to read good literature and be alone, alone with yourself, with your thoughts and good authors, made the child a deeper and purer person. Albert Likhanov calls deprivation the stage of his life when he was isolated from a teenage environment filled with goo and obscenities. Yes, as a result of this, he turned out to be obscenely underdeveloped and was forced to “catch up” with his peers, but is the ability to swear really good for a teenager? It can be argued whether deprivation of teenagers can be called deprivation of the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of computer games, but smart parents protect their children from computer games. At the very least, they limit this time by involving them in other matters so that the children do not turn into monsters like Sasha Fokin.