As a separate, third form of adaptation appears the choice of a new environment, where alloplastic and autoplastic changes are combined. Human as a carrier of consciousness has one more form of adaptation including both the first and the second kinds, but containing a qualitatively new purpose, namely, the search for and choice of a “new” – “the new environment”, which is favorable for human functioning. This constant search for “the new” is very meaningful in human life and adaptation. It is implemented by the functional subsystem of perception and information processing, the so-called “information subsystem” consisting of a number of leading links. One of those is a link providing search and information processing, its storage and usage. For a full-scale work of this subsystem it is necessary that the information items contain elements of novelty and be somewhat indeterminate. It is the presence and search for novelty in information flows that are developed in males but not due to genetic peculiarities of their brain structure but as a consequence of the developing psychosocial adaptation in the world full of stresses.
The activity of this subsystem functioning is directly proportional to the state of the environment in which a person lives at every particular moment in his life. The more crisis-prone the environment, the less active is the search for novelty in information, but the greater the need for experience to overcome the complexities of this environment.
Another important principle of adaptation, according to Hartmann, is change of function. To estimate the adaptive significance of a particular behavior, it is necessary to distinguish the currently existing function of this behavior from the one that existed originally. Behavioral functions often change in the process of adaptation, and, ultimately, behavior can serve a purpose different from the original. The knowledge that functions change helps to avoid the so-called “genetic error”, a simplified assumption that an individual’s current behavior is a direct outcome of the past. This point of view confirms the role of the social environment in changing the genetically engineered program, i.e. “A man himself is able to choose some part of his fate and adjust it himself”. Change in the environment and change in the functions provide the flexibility of mental adaptation, without which a productive full-fledged life is impossible.
Equally important role in the process of adaptation plays the automation mechanism, which provides, as opposed to flexibility, the rigidity of mental adaptation. The interrelation and interdependence of the mental and somatic in the course of human evolution and the formation of a healthy “I” (“Ego”) are manifested in a systemic behavior and use of bodily capabilities – the somatic system for adaptation. Integration of somatic systems involved in the operation, with their constant use, is automated; the same happens with mental efforts involved in the action. With the increased training of some action, its intermediate steps disappear from consciousness.
To explain this, E. Kretschmer (1922) proposed a law of “formula abbreviation”: not only motor behavior, but also perception and thinking show automation (a certain similarity to a habit). S. Freud (1905) wrote: “Such processes played out in the preconscious and elusive, with which consciousness is connected, can be called the appropriate term “automatic”. The place of these automatisms in mental topography is the preconscious, rather than the unconscious (“Id”), besides, these automatisms can be distinguished from the automatisms of the unconscious”. We are interested here in the purpose-oriented achievements of these automatisms and their important role in the schematics of the adaptation process. Automation has undoubted economic advantages and stipulates many complex achievements in central psychic domains. It is common knowledge in physiology that generation of automatism reduces metabolic expenditures, accelerates transformation and saves energy.
As Hartmann writes (2002), “we can say, automatisms – like other mental phenomena are also under the control of the external world, and under certain conditions, formula-abbreviated behavior is a better guarantee of mastering reality than new adaptation in each specific occasion”. This manifests the protective role of pre-consciousness automatisms, their stimulus barrier.
Thus, both flexibility and automation (rigidity) are inherent and necessary for the “Ego”. There are three groups of functions that are active in the mental sphere of man: some mental functions assuming a flexible form provide flexibility and plasticity of the psyche, behavior of man and his state of health; other functions assuming the automated form provide lower expenditure of energy resources and time that are often crucial for adaptation, accelerating the conversion of energy; and the third group is comprised of mental functions, which combine the initial two in different proportions.
In a complex human mental sphere thought, imagination, and recollection often become a triggering factor, “stressor of stressors” activating the mechanism of stressogenesis, eliciting the entire range of the vegetosomatic effect inherent to the phases of GAS. As a result mental adaptation becomes more complex, expanded, evolved, reflecting the evolution of the world of man and the evolution of man himself, his knowledge, values, wishes and purpose of life. In the course of evolution there comes about the “central regulating organ”, commonly called “the inner psychic world” that is located between the receptors and the effectors. This inner world (psychic) is built up gradually, by virtue of the so-called existing “stimulus barrier” that enables to perceive and to forward “only a fragment of the initial (stimulus)” reality of the world of man (Freud, 1920).
But man is an amazing creature! He is not content with a life-long adaptation to the actually changing environment, the changing human environment and to his own self. With the development of consciousness an individual, and only he, as shown by many studies, while living his own life, is also permanently forming his own “subjective reality”, his own idea of the world of things, of other people and of his own status. Meanwhile, the latter category is associated with self-rating, varying from an overestimation of oneself, one’s capacities and capabilities, to their underestimation. The result is that the individual adapts not so much to the objective reality but to the so-called “psychic reality” built by himself as an integrative “product”, as a fundamental integrative formation of the perceived outside world, colored by personal experiences and personal estimates. As a result, a “semantic reality” is created, enriched and framed by thoughts, feelings, fantasies, anxieties and suspicions. In forming this reality a sizeable role belongs to the past events, imagination and perspectives, to say nothing of the unconscious predictions forming the guidelines.
The emerging mental reality is not the reality that is mostly identified with the outside world and regarded as “objective reality”. The mental reality, at close scrutiny, is a colored palette of diverse interpretations of the outside world by different people, for each of them “his own reality is the most objective”, the one he is being adapted to. The mental reality is constructed through personal experience enabling perception of current life. E.g., a person gone through a traumatic situation, retains this experience, often perceives this world acting in it at present and in the future in the light of a traumatic reality of the past. It is this person who crosses the threshold of the doctor’s office, having his own idea of the disease, the formulated internal picture of the disease. The mental reality can be regarded as synonymous to the inner and subjective reality. All three terms – mental, inner, and subjective realities are designed to limit the subjective experience of an individual from the world of physical objects. Some theorists attempt to introduce certain corrections to delimit the mental and the inner reality.
They correlate the mental reality with the inner sources of subjective experience that is with unconscious fantasies and images, for which the perceptions incoming from the outside world are an outside source of subjective experience. With regard to the term “inner reality”, they understand it as a most general phenomenon reflecting a total subjective experience based upon integrative images of the perceived outside world.
Similar to the inner reality, which is not a “pure” product of imagination, the