Deficiency, rehabilitation and individual development: psychological and trans-cultural questions

Abstract

By means of a ceaseless information exchange with the environment, humans attain progressively higher levels of complexity in behavior. They play an active role in the interaction with their social context, selectively replicating in daily life some cultural information units, in terms of activities, interests, relationships, sources of knowledge. This process has been defined Psychological Selection and it is guided by the quality pf experience a subject perceives in dealing with environmental information and opportunities for action. Optimal Experience, or Flow, fosters individual development, inducing the subject to look for more and more complex opportunities for action, to face with improving abilities. It contributes to the identification and building of an individual's Life Theme, which comprises the basic life goals and lifelong targets. This perspective has only recently been adopted in the study of organic and psychic pathology, and even more rarely in the cross-cultural comparison of pathological samples. As concerns disability, studies have emphasized the importance of Optimal Experience in fostering individual's physical as well as social functioning among blind and paraplegic adult people, as well as among disabled children.