Autoplastic adaptation (from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece 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 ...

word auto) is a form of adaptation where the subject attempts to change itself when faced with a difficult situation. The concept of autoplastic 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 explained as originatin ...

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

, and

Franz Alexander Franz Gabriel Alexander (22 January 1891 – 8 March 1964) was a Hungarian- American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology. Life Franz Gabriel Alexander, i ...

. 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 Alloplastic adaptation (from the Greek word "''allos''", meaning "other") is a form of adaptation where the subject attempts to change the environment when faced with a difficult situation. Criminality, mental illness, and activism can all be class ...

: The subject tries to change the situation, i.e. the external environment.

Autoplasticity, hysteria and evolution

' Hysterical individuals appear to be turned inward. Their symptoms, instead of presenting actions directed outward (alloplastic activities), are mere internal innervations (autoplastic activities)'.

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 pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...

, with 'his single-minded Lamarckianism', speculated that behind 'Lamarck's idea of "need"' was the 'power of unconscious ideas over one's own body, of which we see remnants in hysteria, in short, "the omnipotence of thought"'. As a result, among his immediate followers, 'Insight into this regressive nature of the phenomenon of conversion may be taken as a starting-point for speculation about the archaic origin of the capacity for autoplastic conversion...according to which

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

took place through the autoplastic adaptation of the body to the demands of the environment'.

Cross-cultural autoplasticity

'Cross-cultural helpers have debated what has been called the autoplastic/alloplastic dilemma: how much should clients be encouraged to adapt to a given situation and how much...to change? Most Western helping modalities have a strong autoplastic bias; clients are encouraged to abandon traditional beliefs...to fit into a dominant society's mainstream'. The analytic relationship is sometimes seen in similar terms: 'the two practitioners in treatment are engaged in an unending struggle between changing the other and effecting internal change..."autoplastic" and "alloplastic"'.Steven Wainrib, "Autoplastic"
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Autoplasticity, hysteria and evolution

Cross-cultural autoplasticity

References

Further reading