Internally simple and externally difficult — a realistic world.
The difference between this world and the previous one lies in the fact that the goods necessary for life are not directly given here. The outer space is saturated with barriers, the resistance of things, and therefore the main «organ» of the life of a creature living here becomes objective activity, equipped with a psyche. This activity, due to the simplicity of the inner world, i.e., the striving of life to satisfy the only need (the chronotope “this is always”), is constantly energetically charged, knows no distractions and fluctuations, and is problematic only from the external, technical side (How to achieve it?). In order to be successful, activity must conform to external material reality, and therefore, along with the principle of contentment, the principle of reality appears here, which becomes the main law of this world. Since the pleasure principle with the demand for here-and-now satisfaction does not disappear from the composition of the world, a fundamental mechanism of «patience-hope» is formed in it, designed to control affects during inevitable delays in satisfying needs.
If in a simple and easy life world there is only one critical situation — stress, which is phenomenologically identical to a crisis, then in a simple and difficult life world they are differentiated. We have already written that in a difficult world, a mechanism of patience develops (more precisely, the mechanism of “patience-hope” [4]), the purpose of which is coping with stress. But in a sense, it is precisely the mechanism of patience that makes the existence of stress as a special psychological situation possible: if there were no patience, we would always face an infantile crisis. Stress, in fact, is an infantile crisis held in check by patience, humbled by patience. The whole life of a creature of a difficult and simple world is permeated with stress, which from an energetic point of view appears as a tense dynamic balance of two attitudes, infantile and realistic. The economy of the difficult and simple world is as follows: either the gradually accumulating energy of this tension is realized in externally oriented activity, or it is forced to be channeled through the soma as a carrier of vitality, giving rise to psychosomatic symptoms.
Frustration in a difficult and simple world coincides with a crisis. Indeed, if a being of this world, having a single need (a single life attitude, motive, activity), experiences frustration, i.e., the inability to satisfy this need, then his whole life as a whole is in jeopardy, and, therefore, such the situation is tantamount to a crisis.
Is there conflict in this life-world? If we represent the simplicity of the life world as its one-component nature, then, of course, in the absence of competing motives, there cannot be a conflict. But even if the objective multi-component life of the essence of this world is assumed, there is no conflict — as a contradiction between two motives that is currently unresolved in the mind — is not here. The inner simplicity of the life world lies in the fact that the subject has neither the desire for the unity of consciousness, nor the ability of mental conjugation and mutual accounting of several life relationships. The emerging objective contradictions between various life relationships do not become the subject of special mental processing, they are resolved by the subject’s non-conscious and volitional efforts. , but by a mechanical collision of impulses. The one that turns out to be stronger at the moment seizes power over the entire life world and owns it monopoly until some other situationally arisen motive exceeds it in terms of motive force. As a result of this play of motives, situations are objectively formed in which the motive that entered the arena is deprived of the opportunity to be realized due to previous behavior that was driven by another motive and, naturally, did not take into account the negative consequences of its implementation for other life relations of the subject. (This typological situation corresponds, for example, to the behavior of an impulsive person who, acting under the influence of the moment, is not able to be restrained by considerations about the consequences of behavior for other life relations that are not relevant at the moment.) In a word, objective collisions of different life relations in this world are quite conceivable, but you can’t call them a conflict.
It is easy to imagine that the absence of internal conflicts inevitably leads to constant external clashes in life relations, but these clashes proceed in the form of frustration — the actual motive cannot be realized. From here, by the way, the positive role, the “necessity” of internal conflicts for life becomes clear. They signal the objective contradictions of life relationships and give a chance to resolve them before a real collision of these relationships, fraught with disastrous consequences.
There is, however, another kind of conflict that is played out within the same life relationship. These are conflicts between goals aimed at the realization of one motive, or between operations leading to the achievement of one goal. Such «operational» conflicts are found in the simple and difficult life world, but they are fundamentally different from «internal conflicts». If Buridan’s donkey had chosen whether to go to the haystack or to the donkey, this would have been an internal conflict requiring the subordination of needs. And fluctuations in the choice of the way to satisfy the same need are rather a special kind of barriers. Thus, the operational conflict is not an independent critical situation, but a frustrator.
The analysis carried out allows us to draw a general conclusion: the actual circumstances of life by themselves do not unequivocally predetermine the type of critical situation that arises in a person. A person whose attitude is dominated by a realistic attitude will sometimes be in a state of frustration even in circumstances in which other people would experience a state of conflict.