CAN WE SPEAK OF " PSYCHOLOGICAL POLLUTION"?

by Alfredo Anania

When we speak of pollution, our mind automatically go toward the natural environment - that is the earth, atmospheric and sea ecosystem; rarely we think the psychological pollution within the human environment where we develop our private or working or social life.

Very frequently the uneasiness, the insidious chronic stress or the psychosomatic ailment originate principally from the contact with those many people who daily trouble what we can call "the psychological atmosphere of the interpersonal relationships". Here we don't allude to a relational context that appears exasperated by the presence of some clearly disturbed - mentally or similar ills - individual,  instead we make reference to substantially in good psychiatric shape people but whose personality is animated by anxiety, ambivalence, hostile tension or excessive dependence and so on. 

Every one well knows that own and other's  life is not static but depends on the psychological (relational, family, social) "field" created by the interacting among the human beings, but few people in truth consider as a person can change with the diversity of the place, the situations and the met people, so, varying the life context, the individual can discover itself as if a diverse person.

The same concept of personality - it comes from the Latin term "persona", whose etymological means it is "mask" - cannot be interpreted simply as the fruit of a genetic constellation but rather it must be considered as a dynamic interlacement (susceptible, therefore, of change with the time) between constitutional factors and experiential factors and they cross with the environmental ecosystem in which the individual develops his own existence.

It follows that some dimensions of our personality characteristics surely are activated by some characteristics of those people we are more frequently in contact, but it is also truth that those dimensions could simply remain at the potential state if unconsciously didn't exist in us something that raises and maintains active in the other just those psychological parts that bother us.

We often desire the spontaneous other people's change or worse we try to modify the other people's behaviour but we often forget that we can only change ourselves; however  in the meeting with the other certainly we could discover that only our behavioural transformation has the power to change our relationship with the other.

There is not a tyrannical manager without an unconscious inclination by the employee to depend as a slave; an infantile wife cannot exist without to be so dreamed by a possessive husband; a sadist doesn't exist in absence of a masochist; a seducer doesn't exist without another person desirous to be irresistibly fascinated.

The conclusion is: often we complain about the other people's behaviour and "badly" we breathe because of the polluted psychological atmosphere that the other one, it seems, is creating, but more rarely we are willing to ask ourselves if, despite the appearances, a deep interior "something" can contribute to maintain just that creates us the greater bother!