Eric Berne: Sensory Hunger

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

We propose to very briefly consider the process of communication between people in the following direction

It is known that babies, deprived of physical contact with people for a long time, degrade and eventually die. Consequently, the lack of emotional connections can be fatal for a person. These observations support the idea of the existence of sensory hunger and the need for stimuli in a child's life that provide him with physical contact. This conclusion is not difficult to come to on the basis of everyday experience.

How does sensory deprivation affect a person?

A similar phenomenon can be observed in adults under conditions of sensory deprivation. There is experimental evidence that sensory deprivation can induce temporary psychosis in a person or cause temporary mental disturbances. It has been observed that social and sensory deprivation is equally detrimental to people sentenced to long solitary confinement, which terrifies even a person with reduced sensitivity to physical punishment.

It is likely that, biologically, emotional and sensory deprivation most often leads to organic changes or creates conditions for their occurrence.

Insufficient stimulation of the activating reticular formation of the brain can lead, even indirectly, to degenerative changes in nerve cells

Of course, this phenomenon can also be the result of malnutrition. However, malnutrition can in turn be caused by apathy, as is the case in infants as a result of extreme malnutrition or after prolonged illness.

It can be assumed that there is a biological chain leading from emotional and sensory deprivation through apathy to degenerative changes and death. In this sense, sensory hunger should be considered the most important condition for the life of the human body, in essence the same as the feeling of food hunger.

Sensory hunger has a lot in common with food hunger, and not only biologically, but also psychologically and socially

Terms like malnutrition, satiety, gourmet, food fad, ascetic can easily be transferred from the realm of nutrition to the realm of sensations. Overeating is, in a sense, the same as overstimulation.

In both areas, under normal conditions and a wide variety of choices, preference mainly depends on individual inclinations and tastes.

It is quite possible that the individual characteristics of a person are predetermined by the constitutional characteristics of the organism. But this has nothing to do with the issues under discussion. Let's go back to their coverage.

For the psychologist and psychotherapist studying sensory hunger, it is of interest to what happens when the child gradually moves away from the mother during normal growth

After the period of intimacy with the mother is completed, the individual for the rest of his life faces a choice that will determine his fate in the future. On the one hand, he will constantly be faced with social, physiological and biological factors that prevent long-term physical intimacy of the type that he experienced as an infant.

On the other hand, a person constantly strives for such intimacy. More often than not, he has to compromise. He learns to be content with subtle, sometimes only symbolic forms of physical intimacy, so even a simple hint of recognition can to some extent satisfy him, although the initial desire for physical contact will retain its original acuity.

This compromise can be called in different ways, but whatever we call it, the result is a partial transformation of infant sensory hunger into something that can be called a need for recognition (In English this term sounds recognition-hunger (hunger for recognition) and together with three other terms - sensory hunger, food hunger and structural hunger - forms a system of parallel terms).

As the path to reaching this compromise gets harder, people become more and more different from each other in their quest for recognition. These differences make social interaction so diverse and, to some extent, determine the fate of each person. A movie actor, for example, needs constant admiration and praise (let's call them "stroking") from even unknown fans.

At the same time, a scientist can be in excellent moral and physical condition, receiving only one “stroking” per year from a respected colleague.

Stroking is just the most general term we use to refer to intimate physical contact

In practice, it can take many different forms. Sometimes the child is really stroked, hugged or patted, and sometimes they playfully pinch or lightly click on the forehead. All these methods of communication have their counterparts in colloquial speech. Therefore, by intonation and the words used, one can predict how a person will communicate with a child.

Expanding the meaning of this term, we will call "stroking" any act that involves acknowledging the presence of another person. Thus, "stroking" will be one of the basic units of social action for us. The exchange of "strokes" constitutes a transaction, which in turn we define as a unit of communication.

The basic principle of game theory is this: any communication (in comparison with its absence) is useful and beneficial for people. This fact was confirmed by experiments on rats: it was shown that physical contact had a beneficial effect not only on physical and emotional development, but also on brain biochemistry and even on resistance in leukemia. A significant circumstance was that gentle treatment and painful electric shock were equally effective in maintaining the health of the rats.

TIME STRUCTURING

Our research allows us to conclude that physical contact in caring for children and its symbolic equivalent for adults - "recognition" - are of great importance in a person's life

In this regard, we ask the question: "How do people behave after exchanging greetings, regardless of whether it was a youth" Hello! "Or the many hours of meeting ritual adopted in the East?" As a result, we came to the conclusion that along with sensory hunger and the need for recognition, there is also a need for structuring time, which we call structural hunger.

There is a well-known problem that often occurs among adolescents after the first meeting: "Well, what are we going to talk about with her (him) later?" This question often arises among adults.

To do this, it is enough to recall a difficultly tolerated situation when a pause in communication suddenly arises and a period of time appears that is not filled with conversation, and none of those present is able to come up with a single pertinent remark in order not to let the conversation freeze … People are constantly concerned with how to structure their time. We believe that one of the functions of life in society is to provide each other with mutual assistance in this matter as well. The operational aspect of the time structuring process can be called planning.

It has three sides: material, social and individual.

The most common practical method of structuring time is to interact primarily with the material side of external reality: what is commonly called work. We will call this interaction process activity.

Material planning arises as a reaction to various kinds of surprises that we encounter when interacting with external reality. In our research, it is interesting only to the extent that such activity generates the basis of "stroking," recognition, and other more complex forms of communication. Material planning is not a social issue, it is based only on data processing. Social planning results in ritual or semi-ritual communication.

Its main criterion is social acceptability, that is, what is commonly called good manners. All over the world, parents teach children good manners, teach them how to pronounce greetings when they meet, teach the rituals of eating, courtship, mourning, as well as the ability to conduct conversations on certain topics, maintaining the necessary level of criticality and benevolence. The latter skill is precisely called tact or the art of diplomacy, and some techniques are of a purely local meaning, while others are universal. For example, eating habits or the practice of inquiring about a wife's health may be encouraged or prohibited by local traditions.

Moreover, the acceptability of these specific transactions is most often inversely related: usually, where they do not follow manners while eating, there they do not inquire about women's health.

Conversely, in areas where it is customary to take an interest in women's health, a consistent style of behavior at the table is recommended. As a rule, formal rituals during meetings precede semi-ritual conversations on certain topics; in relation to the latter, we will use the term "pastime".

The more people get to know each other, the more place in their relationship begins to take individual planning, which can lead to incidents.

And although these incidents at first glance seem to be random (this is how they are most often presented to the participants), nevertheless, a close look can reveal that they follow certain patterns that can be classified.

We believe that the entire sequence of transactions occurs according to unformulated rules and has a number of regularities. As long as friendships or hostilities develop, these patterns often remain hidden. However, they make themselves felt as soon as one of the participants makes a move not according to the rules, thereby causing a symbolic or real cry: "Not fair!" Such sequences of transactions, based, in contrast to pastime, not on social, but on individual planning, we call games.

Different versions of the same game can underlie family and married life or relationships within different groups over several years. By arguing that social life is mostly made up of games, we do not mean to say that they are very funny and that the participants do not take them seriously.

On the one hand, for example, football or other sports games can be quite fun, and their participants are very serious people. In addition, such games are sometimes very dangerous and sometimes even fatal. On the other hand, some researchers included quite serious situations in the number of games, for example, cannibal feasts.

Therefore, the use of the term "game" in relation to even such tragic forms of behavior as suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, schizophrenia is not irresponsibility and frivolity.

We believe that the essential feature of people's games is not the manifestation of the insincere nature of emotions, but their controllability

This becomes evident especially in cases where the unbridled expression of emotions entails punishment. The game can be dangerous for its participants. However, only violation of its rules is fraught with social condemnation.

Pastimes and games are, in our opinion, only a surrogate for true intimacy. In this regard, they can be viewed more as preliminary agreements than as alliances. That is why they can be characterized as acute forms of relationships.

True intimacy begins when individual (usually instinctive) planning becomes more intense and social schemas, ulterior motives, and constraints recede into the background

Only human intimacy can fully satisfy sensory and structural hunger and the need for recognition. The prototype of such intimacy is the act of loving, intimate relationships.

Structural hunger is just as important to life as sensory hunger. Sensory hunger and the need for recognition are associated with the need to avoid acute deficits in sensory and emotional stimuli, as such deficits lead to biological degeneration.

Structural hunger is associated with the need to avoid boredom. S. Kierkegaard described various disasters arising from the inability or unwillingness to structure time. If boredom, longing lasts long enough, then they become synonymous with emotional hunger and can have the same consequences. A person isolated from society can structure time in two ways: through activity or fantasy. It is known that a person can be "isolated" from others even in the presence of a large number of people.

For a member of a social group of two or more members, there are several ways to structure time

We define them sequentially, from simpler to more complex:

1. rituals;

2. pastime;

3. games;

4. proximity;

5. activity.

Moreover, the latter method can be the basis for everyone else. Each member of the group seeks to get the most satisfaction from transactions with other members of the group. A person gets the more satisfaction, the more available he is for contacts. At the same time, the planning of his social contacts occurs almost automatically. However, some of these "pleasures" can hardly be called that (for example, an act of self-destruction). Therefore, we change the terminology and use neutral words: "win" or "reward".

The "rewards" received as a result of social contact are based on the maintenance of somatic and mental balance.

It is associated with the following factors:

1.release of tension;

2. avoidance of psychologically dangerous situations;

3. getting "strokes";

4. maintaining the achieved balance.

All these factors have been studied and discussed in detail by physiologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts.

Translated into the language of social psychiatry, they can be called as follows:

1. primary internal "rewards";

2. primary external "rewards";

3. secondary "rewards";

4. existential (ie related to life position) "rewards".

The first three are analogous to the benefits derived from mental illness, which are detailed in Freud. We have learned from experience that it is much more useful and instructive to analyze social transactions in terms of the received "reward" than to consider them as defense mechanisms.

First, the best defense is not to participate in transactions at all.

Secondly, the concept of "protection" only partially covers the first two types of "rewards", and everything else, including the third and fourth types, is lost with this approach. Whether play and intimacy are part of the activity matrix, they are the most rewarding form of social contact.

Long-term intimacy, while not so common, is mostly a highly private affair. But important social contacts most often flow like games. They are the subject of our research.

Illustrations: Anil Saxe