APATHETIC AND AGITATED BOREDOM. Ralph R. Greenson, M.D.

This study starts by analyzing those factors responsible for the specific constellation of feelings which characterize boredom. The unpleasurable feeling of emptiness is explained on the basis of a hunger for satisfying stimuli which has as its model the hunger of infancy. The torturous waiting, and the painful slowness of the passage of time, as well as the passive, expectant attitude toward the external world, also seem to be derived from the infant's state of hunger. It is characteristic to have an impoverishment of conscious and preconscious fantasies in states of boredom; instead of fantasies there is a 'full-of-emptiness' sensation. People become bored when specific instinctual aims are repressed. The feeling of boredom takes the place of the distorted derivatives of the repressed usually seen in the neurotic. This self-inflicted deprivation seems to stir up the memory of the infantile deprivation.