Male’s Health in the Objective of Stressology – Beyond the Usual. Армен Мурадян

head and looks for a pacifier with lips. If you put a pacifier in his mouth, the child will automatically start sucking it. Sensations of different modalities have different dynamics in the development; their degree of maturity at different times is different.

      Psychoanalysis practically did not pay due attention to the phenomenon of pain as the cause of vibration and sensation of displeasure. And as claimed by K. E. Izard (1999), the pain is the underlying motivation, which causes a great variety of negative emotions. It cannot be disagreed. Both tactile skin and nonspecific pain receptors are spread throughout the body and are sites of entry through which reality penetrates and stimulates the development of the inner mental world. Nonspecific theory of the origin of pain impulses, or the intensity theory was developed by various authors, including A. Goldscheider (1894). According to this theory, sensation of pain is caused by intense stimulation of different nonspecific sensory receptors (temperature, pressure, visceral, and others) and conduct of pain impulses to certain brain formations. Based on this theory, we can talk about the infancy period of nonspecific pain prevalence. Modern pain theories already relate to a specific phase of the pain as a consequence of psychodynamics. The data of both foreign and domestic scientists (Dionesov S. M., 1963; Reynolds, 1969; Terenius, Schneider, Perth, 1973; Kryzhanovsky G. N., 1973–1993; Kassil G. N. 1975; Kalyuzhny L. V., 1984; Filin V. I., Tolstoy, A.D., 1996, Reshetnyak V. K., Kukushkin M. L., 2001, and others) single out specific pain receptors, specific afferent pathways and specific brain structures forming pain sensation and body responses to it. According to this theory, the pain arises due to the prevalence of activity of nociceptive (algogenic) system over activity constantly functioning in a healthy body of antinociceptive (antialgogenic) system.

      A. D. Zurabashvili considered pain as a protective response, which represented the ancient form of experiences and which served to a human as a trouble signal. Pain is associated with fear. Fear is unpleasant in itself. A baby when alone starts crying, and if nobody comes up to it, the crying turns into screaming. The baby gets rid of the tension and takes pleasure only through the sense of the kinetics of someone else or through making movements itself. Therefore, the kinetic modality of irritations is determinative equally with the tactile and pain sensitivities.

      Considering the pleasure principle as the main driving force, Freud at the same time admitted that on the whole it would be wrong to say that that principle rules over all the mental processes. The case is that “in the soul there exists a strong tendency to the domination of the pleasure principle, which is, however, opposed to various other forces or conditions, and thus, the final outcome will not always comply with the principle of pleasure”. He admitted that considering the existence of the external world with its all possible limitations, the pleasure principle from the very beginning should be acknowledged useless and sometimes even dangerous to human life. On three sides the psyche is threatened by various distressors: on the part of the body – pain, diseases, traumas; on the part of the society – interpersonal conflicts; on the part of “I” – intrapersonal conflicts and complexes. Therefore, according to Freud, the principle of pleasure under the influence of life circumstances transforms into the reality principle. The task of getting rid of suffering and exclusion of pain forces out the pleasure principle. It must be emphasized that the redistribution of the roles of “pleasure” and “reality” in the structure of the mental world is carried out under the influence of the psychosocial factors associated with human maturation. An adult male is able to consciously control the display of the desire for pleasure, or also consciously move away from the world, for example, to a monastery. In both cases it is a conscious departure from the reality of existence of secret desires that modern man forces out into the unconscious, and curbs them there with the help of mental barrier erected between consciousness and the unconscious. But there is also an unconscious escape from the outside world problems in the form of mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia; among semiconscious, can be mentioned deviant behaviors, drugs and alcohol.

      Freud did not restrict himself to the consideration of the two principles of mental activity – the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He tried to look beyond the pleasure principle, in order to understand what forces are at work in the depths of the human psyche. Such an attempt has led to the fact that the founder of psychoanalysis recognized striving for the preservation of peace as the dominant tendency of mental life, and even of the entire nervous activity, that is, put forward the third principle – the principle of the constancy (peace, nirvana). Considering that the striving for preservation of peace, the cessation of internal irritant tension finds its expression in the pleasure principle, he has come to the conclusion that this is one of the strongest motives for confidence “in the existence of attraction to death”.

      Probably, the presence of the “peace principle” predetermines the presence of its alternative – the principle of vibration (oscillation) as the basic principle of the brain life activity proved by the data of EEG. Cessation of the brain wave activity on the electroencephalograph monitor is the basis to certify person’s death in reanimation. It may make sense to speak about two primary principles, existence of two dominant tendencies of mental life: striving for vibration (“oscillations”) as a neurophysiological principle of the brain activity, deadaptation, according to Selye and striving for preservation of peace – the nirvana principle, which was acknowledged by the founder of psychoanalysis S. Freud. The interaction of these two opposite principles is carried out through the pleasure principle.

      If adhere to the psychodynamic approach, the mental world of a male develops through the brain constant need to sensor stimulation recorded by EEG in the form of wave activity. Any constancy and duration of the situation, which is passionately desirable from the point of view of the principle of pleasure and the principle of peace, causes only a feeling of indifferent content.

      The psyche is set up so that it is able to enjoy only in the presence of contrast, which can be attributed to the novelty principle. Freud and his followers tried to unify the active principle of the psyche by discovering the pleasure principle and eliminating all discrepancies through discovery of unconscious. But at the later stages, Freud introduced the concept of the reality principle, then of nirvana, later on – intrusive memories, thus proving that the psyche is virtually not subjected to unification, because different laws operate in the biological and mental worlds.

      Probably, it is necessary to recognize the existence of the following principles underlying the formation of the structure of the mental world: the principle of vibration, the principle of novelty, the principle of peace – nirvana, the principle of pleasure, the principle of obsessive repetition; and the irritations of the three modalities – tactile, painful and kinetic.

      Reflecting on the structure of the mental apparatus, Freud insisted that it consisted of the conscious, preconscious and unconscious phases of the mental process. Preconscious-Consciousness are sensitive to any qualitative difference in impressions from the outside world; from the inside they perceive only the growth and weakening of tension, which on the scale of pleasure – displeasure are expressed by a whole range of mental qualities. Freud realized the difficulty that he faced in the search for a simple answer to this question. At first, he marked equality sign between pleasure and weakening of tension, between dissatisfaction and its increase, but soon this relationship ceased to be simple and clear for him: “… pay attention to the fact that this hypothesis suffers uncertainty, because we were unable to determine the essence of the relationships between pleasure and displeasure through a change in the strength of mental excitations. One thing is clear: these relationships can be quite different and certainly in any case may not be easy”, he wrote. As for the mechanism operating here, we find in Freud several approaches to this problem. In the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) Freud called to distinguish displeasure and the feeling of tension (distress by H. Selye) because pleasant tensions also exist (eustress by H. Selye).

      Psychologists and humanists traditionally blame Freud for seeing the cause of all disorders in human sexuality and considering the principle of pleasure overriding. If this thesis is partly believable for the early Freud (before he actually talked about the primacy of the pleasure principle), then in 1920, Freud described a more fundamental principle that worked regardless of the principle of pleasure – the principle