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Essay on The role of learning in the development of various forms of maladjustment
Transformation involves new learning, especially the kind of learning in which the learner goes beyond merely acquiring new information. Accommodative learning is also familiar because it occurs naturally when a child learns to walk, control one's bowels, ride a bicycle, or swim. This type of learning creates an experience that is impossible to forget. It even becomes difficult to remember what it was like before one knew how to do these things because it involves a subtle change in how the self is experienced. However subtle these changes, such accommodative processes should be recognized as being transformative. Certain more passive but dramatic accommodative experiences are also transformative, such as trauma, near-death experiences, or being deeply loved, because they change the way one feels about self and the world.
Puberty is a major example of accommodation and developmental transformation. Before puberty, members of the opposite sex are regarded as vaguely exotic and at times irrelevant. However, with the help of hormones and sociocultural patterning, they become objects of attraction, which creates sexual excitation and forges new relationships. During puberty, development becomes increasingly complex as multiple lines of learning are integrated into one's concept of self. For example, interest in the opposite sex becomes more than a matter of fantasy and excitation; it quickly becomes a process requiring grooming, communications skills, a relinquishment of childish egocentricity, follow-through, and later the additional complexity of commitment.
Similarly, other types of personal development, such as work, spirituality, or general socialization, also involve the integration of increasing numbers of roles. However, some of these lines of development may fail to synchronize with the others, so that although a person may appear to be fully mature, certain roles remain in a rather primitive state, resulting in immature modes of thinking and feeling. Emotional maladjustments and character pathology may be usefully viewed as being the product of such underdeveloped dimensions of the personality.....................
