Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
85/584 page 57
![A Theory of Adaptation and the Risk of Trauma 57 a series of events, including the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of science and technology (which have culminated in the bomb). And meanwhile man has suffered a series of ego-deflating losses: for example, following Copernicus, the loss of his place in the center of the universe: following Darwin, his uniqueness among living creatures; and following Freud, his rationality as the guiding force of his inner life and his behavior. Such events as these have contributed to the erosion of what once were the eternal verities of Western culture and now, in an atmosphere in which few uncertainties exist, it is hardly surprising that many individuals experience the anxiety of uncertainty [24]. It is characteristic of the current intellectual and esthetic expressions of our time, whether in literature, the theater, or in art, to reflect such uncertainty^® or even the absurd nature of man's experience, insofar as it does not relate in any understandable way to a sense of meaning and order in one's world [26] and hence in one's life. What To Do About Stress and Trauma? If adaptation involves the articulation of the A, B, and С components, then stress occurs when, for some reason, the components do not articulate adequately. But because the three components are interdependent, and each of them is subject to change (sometimes fortuitously), everyone experiences stress from time to time. If the stress is intense and/or prolonged enough, trauma (which indicates a functional breakdown of the system) will result. The conditions that encourage and also alleviate stress and trauma may be grouped into two broad classes. One class has to do with the relatively short-term states of stress and trauma that result when one or more of the components fail to articulate fully with the others. This class of phenomena frequently reflects an individual's difficulty in managing his behavior effectively in a 18 Marriott [25], for example, in discussing art around the turn of the present century, observed that some artists, like Rousseau, stayed in Paris but inhabited a strange world of their own. France was changing rapidly, enormous technological advances were taking place—trains, airplanes, derigibles, balloons, suggesting the telescoping of time and space. There are no airplanes in the paintings of Picasso and Braque; instead there are suggestions of the breaking up of traditional ideas of time and space.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0086.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
