The Problem Of Apathy

People do not limit themselves to living, but rather we lead our lives, which is proposed to us as a task, which is none other than giving meaning to our lives, and this forces us to take charge of the situation regarding the objects that surround us. , to others, and to ourselves.

From birth, an ideal image of ourselves is formed in a very complex way that is matched to the image we have of our body, and informs us of our deepest desires. We wish to exalt and glorify this ideal image, and to do so, in our unconscious, we create defense and self-protection systems.

Anything that does not satisfy this ideal image of ourselves creates an imbalance, a frustration that we must avoid. When the activity we carry out does not satisfy the desires for emotional adaptation between the ideal fabricated image and the reality in which we find ourselves, we cannot carry out a perfect structuring within ourselves because there are “primitive” desires (of anger, shame, envy). , resentment) that no way of life we ​​pursue can structure.

This attitude leads us to apathydoes not allow us to maintain constant interest, enthusiasm, enthusiasm for that thing, apparently so simple, that we call living. It is, as the Homo Sapiens of the caves would say, so human, so elementally human, that we can understand why the lack of readjustment between the ideal of ourselves is expressed by disturbances in the mental sphere with the development of productions. pathological and neurovegetative.

The problem of apathy

Dehumanization, caused by the injuries produced by existing and living, only finds correction when we become aware and responsible that we have to bear our own situation.

Now, understanding the situation in this way, what we are interested in highlighting is that this responsibility is, fundamentally, responsibility for a duty, and this duty is the realization, during our life, of certain values.

Values ​​have a real existence outside of the person who perceives and manages them, so it is necessary to know how to capture the value of things.

Giving meaning to life is placing it in the world of valuesbut there are many ways to achieve this, which we cannot explain at this moment, but what we do want to highlight is that any of us should not cling to a certain group of values, without seeing beyond it, but rather we should be the agile enough to know how to move from one group to another. In this way, life imposes on us an elastic adaptation to the possibilities offered to us.

As a psychologist specializing in clinical psychology, when faced with my patients, who come apathetic, without enthusiasm, because life has taken away their positivity of realizing values, and, therefore, nothing fulfills them, nothing excites them, it consists of making them reach the awareness that the meaning they believe they find in another way of living, they can find in the life they really live. And in this way, if we give meaning to the patient’s immediate reality, we will break the existing dichotomy between their ideal and their reality.

Every psychotherapist is obliged to help his patients understand that the door that separates the ideal of oneself and personal reality is a golden door. which once the earthly aspect of its dichotomy has been overcome, becomes heavenly and lasting because it is the engine of its spiritual, emotional and physical growth that crystallizes in its humanization.

Emotional imbalances

Anyone who reads the title of this work that we have developed may have thought that we were going to talk about persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia), since other terms are added to the term apathy (little energy or fatigue; low self-esteem; lack of concentration or difficulty to make decisions; feelings of hopelessness).

Now, a review of the literature on fatigue – which is the symptom that best characterizes dysthymia – shows us, above all, a great variety of definitions and terms – ponosis, surmenage, asthenia, and above all, this obscure group that had been called, since the time of Pierre Janet, as psychasthenia, neurasthenia, constitutional asthenia, etc. -, which seems to indicate a conceptual diversity. What happens, we believe, is that with the term fatigue or apathy, or other similar ones, different aspects of a common process have been expressed.

That is why in fatigue or low energy we must distinguish between fatigue, itself, which is the dynamic process in which performance declines, so from a psychological point of view it has no significance, and fatigue, which is a purely psychological concept. belonging to the sector of experience and that makes it difficult to concentrate or make decisions (a symptom typical of dysthymia).

Within certain limits, both can occur independently. Thus, when fleeing from pursuers, one’s energy can be exhausted without the slightest sensation of fatigue, or the opposite phenomenon can occur, as occurs in certain diseases, such as dysthymia, in which A vivid feeling of tiredness appears – which progresses persistently –, while there is hardly any notable decrease in the capacity for objective achievement.

As we said earlier, the engine of spiritual, emotional and physical growth that crystallizes in the humanization of the human being lies in the harmony derived between his “real” self (the person he is) and his “ideal self” (the person he is). would like to be). And the depressed mood, one that progresses during most of the day, present more days than it is absent, is a consequence – among others – of disharmony (between your “real” self and your “ideal” self).

Therefore, from a morphological point of view, the person differs from higher mammals only in the brain, but not exclusively because of its greater overall size, but precisely because of the greater development of the frontal and temporal lobes.

Hence, when these portions are injured, disorders occur that have no equal in the animal world, and that some authors summarize with the term dehumanization.

This situation of the person is decisive for their understanding. Personality functioning resides in the frontal and temporal lobes. (“Who am I?”; “What path to follow?”; What empathy to achieve?”; and “What level of intimacy to achieve?”). These questions force us to replace a fleeting system of security – typical of the primitive forces that we share with the animal kingdom (for example: aggressiveness) – with another weaker and infinitely more perceptible one, but which inexorably forces us to take charge of our situation: situation in front of the objects that surround us, in front of the others with whom we live and in front of ourselves – knowing what we want and where we are going.

The frontal and temporal lobes put us in a situation of having to take charge of things in order to live, which means to be able to dominate and defend ourselves from the world that opens before us.

When fear, uncertainty, and insecurity invade us, neurovegetative disorders (somatizations), apathy, and a lack of hope appear because we are not capable of directing that simple and biological thing called living.

And this not only happens to adults, it also presents with an early and insidious onset (e.g., in childhood, adolescence or youth) and, by definition, can have a chronic course arriving at older ages. to dysthymia.