Depth Interview III. General Adjustment, Mental Health and Physical Health

Abstract

The findings related in Chapter Nine point to the impact of physical health on the development of mental health in all four periods of life. The significant relations of mental health to physical health in these periods and the significant relation of general adjustment to it in childhood, seem to affirm the correctness of Alfred Adler’s conception of the significance of “organ inferiority” in childhood for later mental health, in that it gives rise to inferiority feelings which have to be overcompensated with a striving for superiority. On the other hand the import of the interrelation between mental processes and the vegetative system and, for instance, of the relation between the lack of adequate love and care in childhood and the child’s physical development and proneness to physical illness, should not be underestimated. The assumption of an interrelation between these variables seems to be justified.