About Chronic Fatigue

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

What about chronic fatigue, which is a common symptom today? Its manifestations can be as follows: fatigue, drowsiness, a feeling of fatigue in the morning, etc. She is often noticed after short physical exertion and various activities and situations that require concentration.

There are many reasons for chronic fatigue. These can be both physiological and psychological reasons. In this article, we will look at the psychoanalytic causes of fatigue.

On the one hand, one can speak of fatigue, due to the difficulty of taking a break in time for rest. Many people forget about this process, without taking breaks from work or any other activity that requires active mental and physical expenditure. The rhythm of life is accelerating so much that a person cannot stop. But here another question arises, that if you can't stop, not because of just one habit, but is a certain symptom?

In psychoanalysis, any symptom is considered as one that serves something. Often, the process of vigorous activity without pauses serves to overlook a certain state of mind. That mental stress that cannot be accepted, understood and voiced in some acceptable way for oneself, begins to be avoided in vigorous activity, which then leads to severe fatigue. Recovery then takes longer than expected. Then the person can talk about the state of chronic fatigue.

We can say that vigorous activity connects a certain mental stress at the physical level, discharging it in a behavioral response. The problem remains that it cannot be fully expressed. A person is forced to resort to this method again and again, leaving no energy for a calmer type of activity or limiting himself in the automatism of repetition, no longer getting pleasure from the process.

Psychoanalyst Gerard Schweck describes this automatism as compulsive repetition associated with trauma. Following an economic point of view on the functioning of the psyche, he notes that this drive for repetition works in self-soothing techniques when trying in vain to reduce mental arousal, resorting to a different kind of arousal.

Psychoanalyst Pierre Marty considers mental fatigue in terms of mental negativity. He defined it as a feeling that accompanies and expresses excessive energy expenditures. These costs are designed to inhibit feelings and expression of emotions. The mismatch between the strength of feelings and their restraint leads to the fact that some of the energy does not come out and is used to create a brake that regulates restraint, which creates conditions for fatigue.

Object relations psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip also notes the inability to remain in a passive state of rest, linking depression to the fact that it is based on schizoid manifestations, where the inability to stay in a passive state of rest is associated with the fear of ego disintegration. Rejection of one's own weakness underlies such fear, that weakness that was formed in the form of an early, unsupportive environment, forming a rigid self.

This type of psychosomatic functioning can speak of a certain type of depression, where the symptoms of depression may be absent, and instead of them apathy and fatigue appear. Pierre Marty points out that this depression is objectless. There is no object here that is lost, as in the case of classic depression, and it is narcissistic in nature.

If we talk about depression from the point of view of the structure proposed by Jacques Lacan, then we can say that there is a very rigid self-ideal, designed to preserve what this symbolic order requires of him, those requirements that seem to need to be met. Activity here is connected not so much with the activity itself, but with the ability to maintain the position of the ideal, but where absolutely everything that does not correspond to it is absolutely not accepted. Thus, not only physical exhaustion leads to chronic fatigue, but also the rejection of the subject from the side of the ideal on which he was held for some time and whose rigid nature does not allow taking other facts into account.

But here it is important not only to accept, as such, that there is a certain impossibility of being constantly held in an ideal position, but the ability to build an ideal I, which differs from the I-ideal in that it has the character of integrity, which is essential for perception, its absence leads to great anxiety. In the case of depression, melancholy, the inability to rely on one's ideal self and the inability to maintain a constant position of the ideal self can lead to the subject being thrown into the position of an object, where the image of oneself disintegrates and only an inexorable demand remains, which one does not meet.

In the process of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, it is possible to understand how one's own I was built, to see its holistic image and to find something that helps to resist unnecessary demands and support one's own desires. A psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, helps in this matter with the help of a conversation that is aimed at supporting, accepting and exploring difficulties.