Instability

INSTABILITY, psychological, a term in characterology and the symptomatology of psychopathy (see), possessing great uncertainty and vagueness. It is intended to signify a weakness of the inhibitory, braking mechanisms in a personality with increased suggestibility, a tendency toward imitation, with a predominance of the simplest impulses, and with a readiness to realize these impulses under the influence of even insignificant stimuli. The concept of instability is usually employed when attempting to classify individual groups of psychopathies. In such cases, individuals who easily sink to the "bottom," who quickly become declassed, and who follow a path where impulsivity dominates their behavior (card gambling, which captivates such people, makes them slaves to their passion; sharply increased suggestibility turns them into subjects who wear the mask of the environment in which they are currently circulating, etc.) are placed under this concept. Hence the terminological variations of instability, such as instables, weak-willed (instables, haltlosen). From what has been said, it is clear that the concept of instability is extremely complex and that in this case we are dealing with the process of the formation of a personality of a certain type under specific historical conditions. It is by no means accidental that psychological instability is coupled with drug addictions and alcoholism, and that, finally, it accompanies the process of the declassing of a personality, supplementing and exacerbating the picture of a personality being knocked out of the production process. The uncertainty about tomorrow, so characteristic and specifically inherent in the structure of capitalist society, cannot but give rise to the exacerbation and manifestation of certain characterological qualities, including psychological instability. The structure of a social order that is fundamentally opposite to the capitalist one, the structure of a society building socialism, provides all the conditions for the genuine development of the personality, simultaneously weakening and ultimately destroying the moments of harmfulness. By this very fact, the fate of "instability" can be resolved. A personality in favorable conditions of development, "in conditions worthy of a human being," to use the expression of K. Marx, compensates for certain deficiencies, both inherited and acquired by it during the period of early development. This process of compensation makes itself felt especially clearly where we are dealing with infantile developmental delays; psychological instability develops precisely on the soil of this very type of developmental delay, being its polymorphic expression. Practical experience in the OGPU colonies (in Bolshevo and other places) confirms what has been said. That is why instability is not something fatalistic, given once and for all, but represents a complex tangle of properties and qualities that are, in the main, the result, and not the cause, of one type of PERSONALITY development or another.

V. Vnukov.