"Man is a social animal," once wrote Aristotle. And this is really so, because outside of society, the formation of a personality is simply impossible. It would seem that you can put an end here.
However, excessive openness is no less traumatic for a person than his loneliness. In addition, in many cases, a person just needs to be alone. This is what will be discussed now.
Treasured hours of solitude
The word "loneliness" has a negative connotation, and for good reason, since in most cases a person perceives his social isolation as deprivation, orphanhood or failure. However, there are situations when a person consciously strives for solitude.
First of all, this concerns people of social professions: teachers, artists, executives - by the nature of their service, they constantly have to contact people, from which they simply get tired.
Another variety is people of a creative mind, who need to be alone during the peak of their creative activity, so that no one interferes with them. In this case, the very fact of being in a closed and poor in impressions environment contributes to the activation of creative abilities. An example is the Boldinskaya autumn A. S. Pushkin, during which the poet, due to circumstances being in complete isolation in his village, wrote several dozen works.
The next reason for solitude is the need for prayer and meditation, during which a person opens up to a higher reality.
Promotional video:
However, even ordinary people, who do not consider themselves to be either the ruling or the creative elite, periodically need solitude. This is not only about sleep or the administration of natural needs, but also about many other things.
So, for example, in psychology there is the concept of "personal space". This is a certain area around the body that a person considers his own. And a person perceives unceremonious penetration into personal space as an insult or a threat to his own well-being.
We add that the size of this territory can vary significantly depending on the situation. That is, personal space can be minimal or completely absent, for example, when a person travels in a crowded bus or when examining a doctor, and expand to the size of his personal plot or apartment in other cases.
Let us also add that from a philosophical point of view, a person as a system can be absolutely neither open nor closed. Some isolation is always needed, like food and air. Otherwise
In this case, a person loses his individuality, and everyone around him will know about his innermost thoughts.
Abandonment as a disease
However, not every solitude leads to creativity or anything useful at all. Moreover, forced isolation, even for good purposes, can lead to a mental drama, which can only be avoided by people with strong nerves, and even then not always.
So, for example, Jesus Christ during his forty days of solitude and fasting in the wilderness was tempted by the devil himself. But even earlier, the notorious Buddha, who had been meditating under a fig tree all night for the purpose of enlightenment, was visited by an evil demon named Mara, who also tried to seduce him and then frighten him.
As for people with an unstable, vulnerable psyche, such isolation can only provoke mental illness in them. This is especially noticeable in persons with existing deviations. The well-known Swiss psychiatrist E. Bleuler wrote about this in due time. He believed that patients with schizophrenia initially ignore the impressions of everyday life, striving for autism, thereby only stimulating psychopathological signs of the disease in themselves.
Many psychologists have said that limiting external impressions (the so-called sensory deprivation) leads to inadequate activation of internal reserves. This was first studied in experiments with an isolation chamber, where quite healthy and mentally balanced people after a while began to experience obsessive auditory and visual hallucinations.
Later, many Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, while in orbit, reported that they heard music coming from nowhere or saw something that could not be there. But all these are people who have passed the most stringent medical and psychological control and, of course, do not belong to the category of mentally ill …
It turns out that the brain of even the most healthy and alien to mysticism of a person, when the flow of information from the outside is limited, begins to produce visual and auditory images.
Deprivation is a limited life
Deprivation is the deprivation of a person of any necessary things, values or behaviors. And the main thing is the lack of information. However, deprivation is not yet a disease, since all the noted hallucinations of the astronauts on their return to Earth completely disappear. It is another matter if sensory isolation lasts for years, and especially if it is present in early childhood.
Particularly dramatic are cases of the development of the so-called Mowgli syndrome, when wild or domestic animals begin to play the role of a foster family. As a result, the child adopts the style of behavior and habits of his surrogate parents, which further impedes his re-adaptation in society. There are more than fifty such cases of transformation of people into animals in the world, but in reality there were many more.
We add that in recent years, children with this syndrome have begun to be found in urban settings.
As a rule, these are children of homeless people or alcoholics who were abandoned by their unlucky mothers and spent a long time in a closed room, unable to communicate with anyone other than homeless animals …
There is something to say about partial deprivation, which, for example, affects people with defects in the sense organs, as well as patients who are immobilized for a long time.
So, for example, in the blind, despite their significant disadvantage, hearing, smell and touch develop very well, with the help of which they achieve extraordinary results, which are often inaccessible to the sighted. Deaf people, on the other hand, have a compensatory increase in visual acuity and visual memory, and all deaf and dumb people are excellent physiognomists and psychologists in those things that relate to postures, gestures and facial expressions.
Moreover, experience shows: if a person loses the opportunity to receive information and realize himself in one area, then he necessarily develops in another, which, as it were, compensates for his previous deficiency. But if this does not happen, then the person degrades, reducing the level of his intellectual or physical organization to the most primitive.
The latter, for example, is noted in many cases of social deprivation, for example, among homeless people and some other marginal individuals, which traditionally include alcoholics and drug addicts. A marginal, he is an outcast, an outsider, i.e. a person on the sidelines of life is the bearer of the most savage habits, often peculiar only to our prehistoric ancestors, and is characterized by a lack of accepted moral standards and hygiene skills.
Arkady Vyatkin