Critical situations of the easy and simple world
Inwardly simple and outwardly light — this is an infantile life world. His desire is for the immediate (here-and-now) satisfaction of his only (“this is always”) his need. The norm of this world is complete contentment, therefore the life of the being living in it is reduced to immediate vitality and obeys the principle of pleasure. The slightest pain or dissatisfaction is perceived as a global and eternal catastrophe.
For an infantile being, any slightest and shortest violation of the desire for «here-and-now satisfaction» is a critical situation. By definition, this is a stressful situation, but is it? Due to the spatio-temporal structure of this world, any particular dissatisfaction instantly develops into a comprehensive psychological catastrophe. Hence, from within, phenomenologically for an infantile being (taken as an ideal type) every stress is a crisis.
This theoretically derived dependence allows us to formulate an empirically verifiable statement: the more weight the infantile attitude has in the psyche of a given person, the more it determines his attitude, the more likely it is that any situational failure and trouble will be felt as a global life crisis.
The specific weight of the infantile attitude in the life world of a person depends on:
- its age (more precisely, the degree of formation of more mature structures);
- constitutional and characterological features (for example, it is great in people with a hysteroid character);
- the current psycho-physiological state (in case of illness, overwork, exhaustion, the influence of the infantile attitude may increase, which manifests itself in increased resentment, capriciousness, incontinence).
In such a state, minor causes can cause global reactions that look inadequate from the outside and cause parents, teachers, doctors the temptation to “correct”, “explain”, “prove”. But all these measures are ineffective, since here one has to deal with an infantile state that has its own logic and scale, and not at all with an erroneous attempt at a rational assessment of the situation.