Primitive reactions and personality reactions

Author: Ernst Kretschmer. Source — www.psychiatry.ru

Primitive reactions evade complete interpolation of a holistic personality to more elementary sideways. They arise in cases where the personality has not yet been formed, is not fully developed, or when they do not meet with full consent from the personality. They may even contradict her and, in the form of isolated formations, fall out of her usual behavior. Therefore, primitive reactions are not specific to a certain extent. With an appropriate degree of experience, they can occur in any person, although most often they occur in a certain type of personality — primitive. In contrast, we call personality reactions those when the entire personality participates intensively and consciously in the occurrence of the reaction, so that the reaction is the purest and most distinct expression of a complete individuality. Thus, the reactions of the personality are strictly specific, limited by the predisposition of the character and certain irritations of the experience. They arise only when the individuality is affected by a suitable experience.

Such experiences, adapted to evoke reactions characteristic of the person, we call key experiences (Schlusselerlebnisse). Character and key experience fit together like a key to a lock, like a complement and an amboceptor, especially when certain forms of the environment act in this way in a cumulative way. Thus, the experience of a small sexual-ethical defeat can have a specifically irritating effect on a sensitive type of character, while for a litigious combative nature it may pass without a trace. On the contrary, a lost civil process for a person of a sensitive type may turn out to be a soon forgotten banality, while for an expansive nature it will call to life all the reserves of strength for a merciless struggle.

The same external experience, for example, unhappy love, is processed by different characters into completely different internal forms of experience, which then develop, as a reaction, in a few typically different directions. An expansive girl will see an unworthy insult for herself, a shame for a man in the infidelity of her lover, in which a girl of a sensitive type will see only her own defeat and shame, and an infantile-hysterical nature, displacing an unpleasant circumstance from her consciousness, in the end will save from him only deaf painful discontent and a desire that has the character of an attraction, which can later be discharged, for example, in several hysterical fits.

Since all experience takes place between two poles («I» and the external world), the actual direct subjective experience also has a bipolar order. Our psychic relation to the outside world is a play of forces in which we experience now a feeling of superiority, joyful power, domination and activity, now a feeling of defeat, cowardly suffering, depression and shame. The first we call sthenic, the second — asthenic experience. Depending on temperament, environment and upbringing, the complex life attitude of each is directed more towards the sthenic or asthenic pole, so that according to the average type of personality reactions, we distinguish between more sthenic or more asthenic characters. Even with primitive reactions, this predominant orientation towards attack or flight is manifested, for example, explosive or sudden actions in a sthenic personality, on average, manifest themselves more in aggressive fits of rage and violence, in an asthenic personality — in actions of fear, despair or flight without looking back. Hysterical pretense is also used by some to exercise their tyrannical instincts for power, while by others to “escape into illness” from solving life-threatening tasks.

There is no doubt that the sthenic or asthenic orientation in the average type of reaction of a person is rooted mainly in the predisposition of his temperament. A hypomanic person is prone to a sthenic attitude to life, to joy and anger, to a naive unshakable self-feeling and optimism, to an almost ridiculous confidence in his value and achievements. A heavy-blooded cyclothymic, on the contrary, is prone to despondency, modesty, lack of self-confidence and enterprise, to suicide, self-accusation, and prolonged depressive reactions. And among schizothymic temperaments, the complex life attitude is quite diverse, although not easily definable. In general, we find among the gentle hyperaesthetics many who cannot endure the experiences of average strength, which are characteristic of ordinary human life. They are deeply hurt by the slightest joke, banal everyday grief, and therefore they constantly feel deeply offended and hurt. They are very prone to asthenic experience, the most acute feeling of insufficiency, the painful effects of complexes, the escape from life to the quiet realm of inanimate nature, ideals far from the world, and all kinds of addictions. They develop, with excessive compensation, an irritated, labile state of health, which threatens every minute to turn into a feeling of painful defeat. A certain degree of autistic narrowing of psychesthesia, in which the allopsychic resonance has almost died out, the ability to perceive someone else’s experience, autopsychic resonance in relation to their own and their own similar thinking and feelings have been preserved. Such a state of psychesthetic proportion often causes in an exaggerated degree, reaching to strangeness, self-aggrandizement, self-adoration, contempt and ignorance of the world around them, excessively exalted and unaccounted for stenotic perception and action, not accompanied by good-natured cheerful naivety, as is the case with a sthenic setting. of the hypomanic type, but expressed harshly, fanatically, insensitively, or goo. Like this, the asthenic attitude of the schizotyme hyperaesthetic easily reveals a nervous, bitter, suspicious tendency to ressentiment, in contrast to the mild, good-natured modesty and despondency of the schwerblutig cyclothymic.

In the construction of a personality with a sthenic brightly responsive character, we find a wide variety of mixtures of the cyclothymic-hypomanic and schizotimic-fanatical parts of the temperament, for example, in clinical psychiatry, the relationship of expansive paranoids and litigants is well known, on the one hand, to chronic maniacs, on the other hand, to well-known paranoid (paraphrenic) groups of schizophrenics. At the same time, among the predominantly asthenic-reacting sensitive types of the group of neurotics who have obsessive ideas, the delusion of which is in the nature of the relationship of everything to oneself, one can sometimes observe a similar constitutional double relationship of subtle schizoid hyperaesthetics and cyclothymic depressive types.

In addition to the sthenic and asthenic life attitudes, there is another, basic, solution to the problem of the interaction between the “I” and the outside world, which is neither victory nor defeat, but simply a retreat to oneself. This is a purely autistic life attitude of a person who wants to own his own joys and sufferings. Prudently fenced off from the disasters of the outside world and closed in itself, the psyche itself realizes the desires that arise in pleasant waking dreams and dear to the heart or proud hopes for the future — and this without any struggle with the outside world, not noticing any obstacles and contradictions on its part; or she frightens herself with fantastic ghosts which she herself has given birth to. Such a purely autistic solution to the problem is the lot of the more passive, indolent and weakly motivated group of schizoids and is possible only on this peculiar basis of temperament, or at least on a partial basis of it.

It is clear that the sthenic, asthenic and purely autistic ways of a person’s reaction to the stimuli of the surrounding world can interbreed and develop from each other in all possible combinations. Therefore, in the course of time, severe asthenic torments of conscience, under increasing pressure of affect, can break out into violent offensive affective actions, and the gentle hyperaesthetic can finally escape from the wounds of conscience that he constantly experiences into the solitude of purely autistic resignation.

Just as often, we observe how primitive reactions and personality reactions are intertwined. The irritation from the experience can pass through a long complex development of the personality, then suddenly disappear from the spiritual surface, energetically pass into a hysterical conversion, into a tic or some kind of incorrect landing and manifest itself in a completely unexpected place. Or such personality development may lead to an acute explosive crisis of affect and come to an end.

Sthenic natures, when experiencing an excessively strong influence on them, experiences in such an acute affective crisis can sometimes bring to an end the internal processing of some experience.

A strong by nature and proud peasant girl became pregnant by a Russian prisoner of war, killed the child and was arrested. In a few days she reacted to this unbearable situation for her with a stubborn prayerful mood. She prayed until sweat poured down her face and she finally, in a nighttime hallucination, saw the sky open to her. After that, she became cheerful, healthy and calm.

We call reactions of this type acute sthenic crises. They are quite rare, because strong natures come to such an exceptional state only under the influence of extreme external influences of experience.

Simple asthenic reactions are most pronounced in such people who are both melancholy soft and hyperaesthetic. With every serious shock of experience, they fall into a depressive-nervous mood, in which they feel very tired, wounded, defenseless and lose their thoughts. Needless to say, this also includes the frequent simple reactive depressions of melancholic cyclothymics, as well as the corresponding nervous breakdowns and fits of despair in schizoids.