Confinement from Productive Activity: Towards a Psychological Configuration for Being

The reality that we are living, permeated by the confinement, can lead us to develop new psychological processes that help us to better carry out an integral development of the psychological configuration. One of the processes that we carry out will be placed under an existentialist category: being. This configuration is developed in the moral process through the contact that we maintain with the circumstances that surround us, or with our productive activity.

Keywords: Subjectivity, Morality, Ethics, Psychology, Existence

That thesis that Ilienkov [1] postulated in 1977, where he manages to understand the bridge between thought and nature, as well as its transformation, manages to mix, although it seems strange, with a thesis by Spinoza:

Se dirá libre aquella cosa que existe por la sola necesidad de su naturaleza y se determina por sí sola a obrar; pero necesaria, o mejor, compelida, la que es determinada por otra a existir y operar de cierta y determinada manera [2].

That thing that exists by the sole necessity of its nature and determines itself to act will be said to be free; but necessary, or better, compelled, which is determined by another to exist and operate in a certain way (2014, p. 5).

That may well refer us to an idea of justice from Rawls’s contractualism, although possibly more elaborate. If I think about the psychological structure from units Vygotski [3], it is quite possible that I can understand that productive activity can be developed starting from another concept that I like more: circumstance Ortega [4]. The idea is quite Orteguian, I must admit it, and it may not be possible if we think of it as the vitalist it wanted to be, but from my point of view the ‘circumstance’ can be integrated and developed, not as a dialectical materialist idea, but as an existentialist idea.

In this way, productive practice is integrated into the circumstance itself, that is, the circumstance is not static, it is always in motion. When the free subject comes into contact with the circumstance, his circumstance, he manages to develop processes of subjectivation. Let me explain: the different national identities that are historically formulated in specific contexts allow the development of subjective configurations González [5] that influence the personality of the subject. However, the field almost forgotten by nature, and that Spinoza failed to see the place in the nodes that the mental structure develops in the bifurcations that it makes when integrating the intermediate link of internalized experience.

In other words, subjective experience learns and is shaped by its circumstances. Or: we are prepared for the ‘confinement’. Although ‘pathology’, or excessive coexistence modes will leave a mark on the mental structure, habit as a habituation mechanism allows us to integrate with the spaces found during the collective (world) experience that is being lived. Here productive practice and freedom play a relevant role.

The problems derived from mental health due to the confinement are not denied, but it is necessary to understand these problems from a health policy: loving ourselves, the best we can, as healthy citizens. Coexistence through different technologies has allowed us to know and experience personality from various spheres, ranging from the economy to public policies; from the social that is configured in specific territories and trenches, to the cultural and artistic fields. These experiences, which move by themselves, manage to converge with the individualities of the different subjectivities. The individual who knows himself and allows himself to be free adapts the spaces for a new integration of being through bifurcations.

Freedom, expressed in the manner of Spinoza, does not exclude the other existence. The limits are drawn and molded with the multiple existences that coexist within a circumstance. Mental activity here is relevant for the individual to adapt to her personality: the development of contact through a technologized nature becomes more stable. These existences know what they have to do on their own to take care of their mental health, but in this process they limit themselves to understand the other realities that accompany them. This is where the state for a new psychological configuration is: being.

This psychological configuration lacks specific space and time. From one moment to another it must adapt to the international information contexts permeated by various policies: health, environmental, citizen, territorial, rights, among others. In a short space we will find ourselves in unknown situations: the return to the “new normal”. If the virus remains (and will remain) as an entity that appropriates multiple objective and above all qualitative spaces (due to its subjective nature in mental processes as an idea), it is very likely that being is positioned as a stable mode of psychological reaction to the new realities concretized by a kind of hypertext.

Immersed in confinement, our identity, as an existential property, manages to develop a productive practice with what is around it: the emotions and sensations that we experience play a relevant role at the time of learning. That is perhaps why we managed to find mutual development with digital reality. We know the negative and positive aspects at the time of use. We learn, for example, that we still have a way to go if we want an interaction ‘as we knew it’: online classes are a wonderful example. And we began to understand, as a relevant aspect, the role of ethics in our formulation of identity with the new ways of being. We seek, albeit in an accelerated manner, a form of normality within a complex context that seeks to reinvent our coexistence with everything.

In one way or another, mental health professionals must begin to develop new conceptual configurations that allow them to adapt to the multiple realities to come, where the fight against ‘capital’ seems to be the greatest salvation and the ‘philosophical essay’ the pill. against depression. The tools, therefore, must be situated from the contexts of identity, not as a community, tribe, national, state shadow; on the contrary, the struggle must be from the identity of empathy, emotion, the universal structure of affection and feeling for the nyame (mother) earth: the idea of being within a home that we inhabit multiple existences.

Whether we like it or not, the true decline that Nietzsche [6] postulated has been transformed, and with it the hierarchy of values for a morality must be reformulated: all ethics, from the position in which it is found, must have to freedom as one of its main concepts. This freedom, true or not, real or non-existent, must be a formulation of productive activity through the realities that happen to us. Rather, in this reality where confinement becomes part of the processes of subjectivation, freedom is situated from the ‘being’. If we do not conceive it from there, the processes of disintegration in the development of the psyche can be more forceful. It should be remembered, therefore, that our development processes are not influenced only by biological and physiological activity; rather, due to our circumstances, the cultural and environmental context, to add the social history, influence and permeate our body Zeigarnik and Bratus [6] until they become rooted in moral development.

From this position, moral development is continuously transformed when we actively come into contact, through bifurcations, with the realities that happen to us: confinement. That is why ‘being’, as a psychological configuration, allows changes in the personality that teach us to live regularly with the confinement derived from the pandemic. Placing a concept, from an existentialist stance, as a psychological configuration leads us to develop processes of subjectivation and integration based on basic and higher psychological processes, that is: memory, learning, perception, language, thought, etc. Learning to integrate our personality in time and space, starting from the moment in which we live, helps us to know relevant aspects of the self. Or, to put it another way: relevant aspects that are integrated into internal thinking and reflection, until we appropriate it to materialize it in external behaviors: recognizing myself as a being capable of developing various socio-emotional spheres, which affect the circumstances that surround me.

The development of a new morality, from the integration of new concepts under a psychological and affective structure, allow freedom to be experienced in situations that modify behavior due to the great subjective burden they have: losses in times of the pandemic, stress and social reactivation through the technologies and processes of ‘being’ within the confinement. These new forms of normality will end up permeating the various subjectivities that we live and will be integrated into new psychosocial processes.

1. Ilienkov E (1977) Dialectical Logic. Moscow: Editorial Progreso.
2. Spinoza B (2014) Ethical demonstrated according to the geometric order. Barcelona: Editorial Gredos.
3. Vygotski L (1995) Thought and Language. Theory of the cultural development of psychic functions. Argentina: Fausto Editions.
4. Ortega J (2014) The Rebelion of the mass. Barcelona: Editorial Gredos, pp. 298.
5. González, F (2006) Subjectivity as an ontological definition of the psi field; repercussions on the construction of psychology. Journal of Psychology UCA, 2(4): 5-24.
6. Nietzsche F (2011) The genealogy of morality, in Nietzsche III, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, p. 49.
7. Zeigarnik B, Y Bratus B (1998) About the correlation of development and the disintegration of the development of the psyche. In Quintanar L (Eds.), The formation of psychological functions during the development of the child. Autonomous University of Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala, pp. 189.