Adaptation

Historical Roots

Interest in concepts of psychopathology has ancient roots. Hippocrates (460–370 BC), a Greek physician, adopted the view that an imbalance in any of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) of the body directly influences the individual’s temperament and physical health, leading to illness and behavioral deviation. He described disorders such as epilepsy, mania, melancholia, paranoia, and hysteria. This conception of psychiatric illness remained active until modern concepts of psychopathology were developed. In the 19th century, psychiatric illnesses that had been described at earlier times were studied and classified in a systematic way. At the time, following the medical model, brain diseases were believed to be the cause of psychiatric illnesses.

During this same period, two historic figures, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, shifted scientists’ attention, albeit from different perspectives, to the study of variations in adaptation and development. According to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, members of a population are replaced in successive generations through the process of natural selection by offspring of parents who have the adaptive traits that allow them to survive and reproduce in their natural environment. Thus, individuals’ adaptation is influenced by the inheritance through natural selection of ancestors who had traits that offered a reproductive advantage.

On the other hand, in Freudian theory, the ego’s function is to coordinate internal and external adaptation. Its role is to express and satisfy the demands of the id (basic instinctual drives) in accordance with external reality and with the demands of the superego (the inner critic or conscience).

In contrast to the prevailing beliefs of the time, both Darwin and Freud viewed adaptation as a dynamic concept. Furthermore, their views offered a key role to the context in which [Page 29]individuals’ lives are embedded for understanding variations in adaptation. Particularly, Freudian theory challenged the medical model of psychopathology, bringing to the forefront the role of individuals’ social context and life experiences in understanding both psychopathology and positive adaptation.

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