Mental health is based on the equilibrium between two ways of relating to reality around us: an economic way and a symbiotic way.
The economic mode, using rational intelligence (or reason, the ability to identify and make logical connections between phenomena observed) works by establishing a psycho-physical relationship with the surrounding environment, to ensure the physical survival of the individual.
The symbiotic mode draws on feeling (or emotional sensitivity, the ability to be moved, or to feel and express emotional elements, in oneself and in communication with others - not to be confused with the ability to feel certain emotions such as fear, anger, gratification, satisfaction) to develop a psycho-affective relationship with one's own human and surrounding environment, and it guarantees the emotional survival of the individual.
The economic mode of relation guarantees physical survival in that the ability to discriminate rationally between what is advantageous for oneself and what can be harmful, to attend to nourishment, reproduction, and shelter from the physical elements (extreme temperatures, the elements, illness, dangerous circumstances) and the use of available resources.
The symbiotic mode of relation guarantees emotional survival: it is the ability both to establish emotional ties, essential as motivation for staying alive, and to recognize their specific emotional value, or what distinguishes each of these ties, because each is unique and unrepeatable. When a person cannot relate economically with reality, he comes up against increasingly serious difficulties in staying alive: he loses strength, can no longer take care of himself and faces death from sickness or hunger - fairly frequently still, as we know, in underdeveloped countries, where whole populations survive with difficulty in conditions of permanent famine.
To counterbalance the tendency to physical annihilation, when equilibrium suffers to the detriment of the economic mode of relation, compensation is sought through the symbiotic mode. Anyone who has had to cope with economic emergencies at the limit of physical survival, like serious illnesses, abandonment, fatigue, or undernourishment, where the ability to maintain economic relations with reality is heavily compromised, knows how important it is not to give up, not to let oneself go, and to hold within oneself the affective reasons for living.
Conversely , when a person cannot relate symbiotically with others, and is excluded from the human world - he feels himself slip towards death, through the syndrome of annihilation (inappropriately confused with the totally physiological and necessary phenomenon of depression) known as "marasmus", the absence of affective footholds, and of emotionally significant relationships fostering the desire to live.
Marasmus - well known in new born babies with no parents - is characterized therefore by a progressive and deep loss of interest in life, to the extent of thinking of letting oneself die, and of suicide as the best solution.
The loss of ability to relate economically with the world is the effect of external agents, which interfere in the development and the maintenance of conditions necessary to the relationship itself. In those who depend on others partly or wholly, like a newborn baby or a sick person, it is loss of care or protection; in those who are self-sufficient, they are obstacles of increasing seriousness up to famine, war, imprisonment.
A threat to the ability to have symbiotic relations is the consequence of external interference in the primary relationship between children and parent. The compromising, even for a relatively short period, of emotional contact with the parent, if perceived as an irretrievable loss, produces pain which is sufficiently bad to cause the freezing of affective sensitivity, that is to say anaesthesia of feeling, as a protective reaction against pain. The onset of anaesthesia of feeling makes symbiotic relations impossible, and in order to counterbalance the tendency to affective annihilation, there is a tendency to turn to the economic mode of relation.
But just as the symbiotic mode of relating cannot make up for an absence of regular nourishment, recourse to the economic mode cannot form a valid alternative to affective relations. The use of the economic mode instead of the symbiotic mode thus reduces a person's expressive possibilities: for example, it replaces friendship with seduction, love with eroticism, trust with control, and the taking of responsibility with the exercise of power. The person's view of reality is no longer balanced both ways, and becomes predominantly economic. The concept itself of feeling is lost, and is confused with emotion, in that constant, deep affective investment is excluded, and the only experience available is immediate and ephemeral.
So we understand why such a situation produces repetitive rigid and stereotyped attitudes, those "survival structures", with peculiar behaviours - referred to in scientific literature to describe various forms of mental illness - which enable us to keep our feelings at bay, and still to respond to everyday requirements.
Just as people deprived of daily nourishment can ignore the problem of food, until they no longer feel hunger pangs, so people excluded from affective relations place "outside themselves" the problem of feeling, from which - yes - they receive messages, but in the form of "voices" unconnected to them, as is well known in descriptions of so-called schizophrenia.