Alloplastic adaptation (from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

word "''allos''", meaning "other") is a form of

adaptation In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the p ...

where the subject attempts to change the environment when faced with a difficult situation.

Criminality In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Cane ...

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disability, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is ...

, and

activism Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make Social change, changes in society toward a perceived common good. Forms of activism range from ...

can all be classified as categories of alloplastic adaptation. The concept of alloplastic adaptation was developed by

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...

Sándor Ferenczi Sándor Ferenczi (; 7 July 1873 – 22 May 1933) was a Hungarian Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Biography Born Sándor Fraenkel to Baruch Fränkel and Rosa ...

, and Franz Alexander. They proposed that when an individual was presented with a stressful situation, he could react in one of two ways: * Autoplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change himself, i.e. the internal environment. * Alloplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change the situation, i.e. the external environment.

Origins and development

'These terms are possibly due to Ferenczi, who used them in a paper on "The Phenomenon of Hysterical Materialization" (1919,24). But he there appears to attribute them to Freud' (who may have used them previously in private correspondence or conversation). Ferenczi linked 'the purely "autoplastic" tricks of the hysteric... othe bodily performances of "artists" and actors'. Freud's only public use of the terms was in his paper "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis" (1924), where he points out that 'expedient, normal behaviour leads to work being carried out on the external world; it does not stop, as in psychosis, at effecting internal changes. It is no longer ''autoplastic'' but ''alloplastic'' '. A few years later, in his paper on "The Neurotic Character" (1930), Alexander described 'a type of neurosis in which...the patient's entire life consists of actions not adapted to reality but rather aimed at relieving unconscious tensions'. Alexander considered that 'neurotic characters of this type are more easily accessible to psychoanalysis than patients with symptom neuroses... ueto the fact that in the latter the patient has regressed from alloplasticity to autoplasticity; after successful analysis he must pluck up courage to take action in real life'.

Otto Fenichel Otto Fenichel (; 2 December 1897, Vienna – 22 January 1946, Los Angeles) was an Austrian psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation". He was born into a prominent family of Jewish lawyers. Education and psychoanalytic affiliations Otto ...

however took issue with Alexander on this point, maintaining that 'The pseudo-alloplastic attitude of the neurotic character cannot be changed into a healthy alloplastic one except by first being transformed, for a time, into a neurotic autoplastic attitude, which can then be treated like an ordinary symptom neurosis'.

Human evolution

Alloplasticity has also been used to describe humanity's cultural "

evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

". Man's 'evolution by culture...is through alloplastic experiment with objects outside his own body....Unlike autoplastic experiments, alloplastic ones are both replicable and reversible'. In particular, 'advanced technological societies...are generally characterized by "alloplastic" relations with the environment, involving the manipulation of the environment itself'.C. D. Malmgren, ''Worlds Apart'' (1991) p. 121

Origins and development

Human evolution

References

Further reading