An Approach to the Psychology of Indifference

After first thought, the problem of indifference stands out as exceedingly significant. Indifference seems to have a variety of meanings. The psychiatrist at once will think of “La belle indifference des hysteriques.” In the hysteric of yesteryear, the state of farawayness and separation from reality were noteworthy. It is not so frequently noted today. One immediately would think of it as a narcissistic phenomenon, connected with depersonalization and akin to similar and more profound states in schizophrenia. In institutions, one sees advanced states in which there seems to be complete divorce from environmental care and concern. There are some individuals who prefer to leave the cares of the world and to enter the more peaceful seclusion of a convent or monastery. Society, at times, sanctions such detachment for some of its members. It is not difficult to go through the social body and to see different institutions and structures, all with varying degree of detachment from the main current of life—universities, organizations of one sort or another; even the family, at rare times, may have some of this quality. Such structures, even to the schizophrenic, represent the fundamental makeup of a culture and the complacency of that culture. They are disturbed, as a rule, only in desperate situations.

Any member of such a group would feel himself relatively at peace with the world, and protected from its hurly-burly. Inasmuch as there is a natural human tendency to get out of the strife of battle, many individuals will want to enter the portals of the sanctum. When rebuffed, the individual may speak of the group approached as complacent or indifferent. The approach of the psychiatrist is the same when the attitude of the patient is one of indifference. That the natural trend of humans is not always for the complacent state, is shown when some prefer the hurly-burly or else return to it, or even enter it as though it represented an outlet for a deep craving for life.

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