Lecture
V.D. Mendelevich's anticipatory concept of neurosogenesis considers the origin and development of neuroses in connection with low anticipatory competence of the personality in the premorbid period. People prone to neuroses are unable to adequately predict future events and prepare for them. Therefore, according to V.D. Mendelevich, «… under conditions of discrepancy between the prognosis and the associated emotional experiences (resentment, disappointment), a person is unable to use the potential opportunities for coping with the situation». Children with neurotic disorders, like adult patients with neuroses, tend toward monovariant forecasting. Raising a neurosis-resistant, well-adapted personality, in turn, presupposes the development of the personality's anticipatory abilities at various stages of ontogenesis
According to Svyadoshch (1982), it has long been noted that unexpected unpleasant messages, for which a person is unprepared, can have a stronger traumatic psychological effect.
Any unexpected change in a situation leads to a mismatch between the situation currently reflected by the sense organs and the situation that the organism expected, predicted (foresaw). The greater the mismatch (discrepancy) between the signal that actually arose and what was predicted, the more information that signal carries, and the more pathogenic it may prove to be. A fright reaction arises from a mismatch between the actual situation and the predicted one; fear reactions result from comparing the predicted situation with the situation that corresponds to the organism's needs; disappointment arises from a mismatch between the expected (predicted) pleasant event and reality. A feeling of joy appears when there is a mismatch between a predicted indifferent or unpleasant event and the pleasant event that actually occurs. In the psychological characteristics of neurotic individuals, one notices the difficulty, and sometimes the impossibility, of foreseeing and predicting the entire possible chain of subsequent stages of activity in a given situation and given a particular attitude toward it. Feedback within holistic activity is underdeveloped or reduced. The mechanism of anticipation, the child's ability to actively anticipate events, forms only after the age of 11—13.
According to Vein and Rodshtat (1979), neuroses involve a disruption of probabilistic forecasting, manifested in a persistent disregard for probabilistic frequencies in statistically homogeneous environments (both predictable and unpredictable). Probabilistic forecasting is understood as the anticipation of the future based on the probabilistic structure of past experience and information about the current situation. Past experience and the current situation provide grounds for forming hypotheses about the forthcoming future, with a certain probability assigned to each of them. In neuroses, forecasting is significantly impaired, and the nature and degree of these impairments depend on the form of the neurosis. According to Menitsky (1981), a strategy of probabilistic indifference emerges in neuroses.
+The essence of the anticipatory concept of neurosogenesis (Mendelevich, 1988—2001) lies in viewing the etiopathogenesis of neurotic disorders in inseparable connection with anticipatory processes at various levels (psychological and psychophysiological). Neurosogenesis is seen as the result of the personality's inability to anticipate the course of events and its own behavior in frustrating situations, which is due to the premorbid characteristics of the «potential neurotic», termed anticipatory incompetence. A personality prone to neurotic disorders excludes undesirable events and actions from its anticipatory activity, orienting itself always only toward the desirable ones. As a result, upon encountering an unpredicted, unfavorable life collision that has thereby been displaced from the «situational scenario», a person finds himself under severe time pressure to apply coping behavior. And even if his system of psychological compensation had been functioning normally, then under conditions of a discrepancy in the prognosis and with an extreme intensity of the emotional experiences (resentment, disappointment, bewilderment) associated with this predictive error, a person may fail to use the potential opportunities for coping with the situation and will develop a neurosis.
V.D. Mendelevich's anticipatory concept of neurosogenesis proceeds from the principle that the cause of neurotic disorders is the anticipatory incompetence of the personality. In this author's work, neurosis appears as the result of the personality's inability to anticipate the course of events and its own behavior, to construct in imagination structures of the future based on past experience. As already noted, a person's ability to anticipate the structure of the future has been termed by him anticipatory competence. A neurosis-resistant personality is distinguished by soundness of judgment, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, and the ability for anticipation and forecasting. People prone to neurosis, on the contrary, orient themselves toward only one outcome of events, excluding undesirable outcome variants. Within the framework of the anticipatory theory of neuroses, the features of anticipation in children suffering from neuroses have been studied. Like adult patients with neuroses, children with neurotic disorders tend toward monoprobabilistic forecasting. Children suffering from neuroses are oriented toward only one variant of how events will unfold. When the forecast is not fixed, that is, when several variants of the development of events exist, children show an increased level of psychoemotional tension and anxiety (D.A. Mukhametzyanova).
Thus, it has been proven that the anticipatory incompetence of a child who has developed a neurosis has a significant influence on the origin of childhood neurotic disorders. However, the factors contributing to the formation of anticipatory incompetence remain insufficiently studied to date. Given the significance of family factors in the emergence of neuroses, we consider it highly relevant to study the influence of parents' anticipatory competence on the formation of anticipatory abilities in their children. Therefore, the aim of this work is to study the anticipatory abilities of children who have developed neuroses and of their parents, in order to determine the influence of parents' anticipatory competence on the development of their children's ability to predict.
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