Autoplastic adaptation

The concept of autoplastic adaptation was developed by Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Franz Alexander. They proposed that when an individual was presented with a stressful situation, he could react in one of two ways:

• Autoplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change himself, i.e. the internal environment.
• Alloplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change the situation, i.e. the external environment.

Autoplasticity, hysteria and evolution

'Hysterical individuals appear to be turned inward. Their symptoms, instead of presenting actions directed outward (alloplastic activities), are mere internal innervations (autoplastic activities)'.

Freud, with 'his single-minded Lamarckianism', speculated that behind 'Lamarck's idea of "need"' was the 'power of unconscious ideas over one's own body, of which we see remnants in hysteria, in short, "the omnipotence of thought"'.

As a result, among his immediate followers, 'Insight into this regressive nature of the phenomenon of conversion may be taken as a starting-point for speculation about the archaic origin of the capacity for autoplastic conversion...according to which evolution took place through the autoplastic adaptation of the body to the demands of the environment'.