PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

Personal disorganization represents the behaviour of the individual which deviates from the social norms. It results in social disapproval which may express itself in a wide variety of degrees. The individual may also react in different ways. Social reality presents an endless confusion of social disapproval from time to time. It may be mild or violent. Accordingly, individuals respond either positively or negatively to social disapproval. The most visible aspect of personal disorganization in complex societies is that in which there is mild social disapproval to which the individual responds positively. This kind of personal disorganization does not deeply disturb the social order.

The second aspect of social disorganization is that in which there is violent social disapproval and yet the individual responds positively. In the third aspect in which the individual’s response to social disapproval is subjective the person retreats into an individually defined inner world. His innovations lose their social character. He becomes enmeshed in the development of mechanisms that further isolate him from the normal influences of group life. This type of personal disorganization results in psychosis through which the individual tries to escape from the web of social relations and in suicide.

STAGES OF PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

Queen and Mann have pointed out three stages in individual or personal disorganization. The stages are:

1. First Stage: In the first stage there is a problem and the individual attempts to find a solution. But if the individual fails to find a solution, he loses his stability.

2. Second Stage: In the second stage of personal disorganization, some persons may reach the third stage without even passing through the second stage. Therefore, the third stage becomes important.

3. Third Stage: In the third stage the individual loses his stability, he may have a nervous breakdown. If there is no satisfactory solution the individual enters upon more or less permanently unadjusted. For example, the criminal or the prostitutes who have lost all sense of social values. This personal disorganization may also lead to insanity or suicide.

CAUSES OF PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION 

When an individual is upset the harmonious functioning of his daily living may result in disorganization. Elliott and Merrill have mentioned four kinds of factors or situations that often disturb the individual’s pattern of living and the following are:

1. Biological factors: This include difficulties arising out of functional disorder, for example, physical illness, injury, mental deficiencies or personal inadequacies which may occasion reorganization in an individual’s life. Due to his biological nature, the handicapped individual becomes maladjusted and unable to overcome his obvious disadvantages.

2. Environment factors: This includes situations like economic distress, confusion, contradiction and conflict in social relations in the family, in the economic world, in religious institutions or in recreational activities, which may bring disorganization in the individual's life.

3. Insecurity of status and role: When the child or the adult may search for security in the society, as we know that the child’s sense of security is based upon the fact that he is his parent’s child and belongs to his parents in a very real sense. When this sense is threatened and when the individual feels there is a lack of recognition and acceptance with the members of his family or his playmates or his fellow-workmen or other associates status this further results in disorganization. The psychological need of the individual to feel himself an essential part of the universe is a recognized fact.

4. Social Crises: It includes sudden shocks in the life of an individual whether due to the death of his near relation or loss of services, loss of property, death of breadwinner etc. which may disturb his life organization.

CAUSES OF PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

Personal disorganization can be due to many things. Rajendra Kumar Sharma book “Social Disorganisation” (pp. 51-52) has illustrated some of the chief causes of personal disorganizations and can be discussed on the following:

1. Conflict of Personal attitudes and social norms: The attitudes and interests of man keep changing with time and the changes in society. Normally, the outlook of man is in conformity with the social norms, but this is not always the case. Everyone tries to behave within the limits set by society, but due to strong passions or sudden emotional fit man commits a violation of the social norms. When the conflict between man's needs and desires becomes acute and he becomes unable to control himself he indulges in antisocial acts like alcoholism, murder, rape, prostitution, cheating, fraud etc. But his unsocial behaviour becomes a social pariah and this further vitiates his alienation from society and social norms.

2. Abnormalities of Personality: Some individuals develop strong complexes early in life which impede their successful adjustment with society. For example, due to some early experiences a man may be a compulsive homosexual, miser or cheat. Again, some individuals suffer from certain congenital abnormalities which come in their way of proper adjustment. Abnormally short and abnormally tall persons experience considerable difficulty in this matter. Similarly, a woman may become a prostitute due to certain physical abnormalities.

3. Personal Disabilities: Due to mental and physical complexes man is unable to make proper adjustments. A man with syphilitic heredity or mongolism or some other abnormalities, can not be a good member of society in as much as he is incapable of fulfilling any useful role.

4. Conflict of Roles: A man is sometimes unable to harmonize different roles he may occupy or may be called to fulfill. For example, a judge may find it difficult to harmonize his roles as justice dispenser and good father or brother or husband. A business executive usually is unable to be a good husband. The wives of big executives keep paramours and this may lead to divorce and other unpleasant complications.

5. Social Crisis: Due to either cumulative or precipitate crises in society, individuals become disturbed personalities. For example, the death of a breadwinner of a family upsets the family members. Again, an earthquake or some other natural calamity may compel people to leave homes and migrate to an alien social environment.

6. Crisis of Values: There is always a gap in the thinking of old and young. Sometimes the conflict is so acute that either young people rebel and leave homes or have their independence quashed by domineering elders.

TYPES OF PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

Some main types of personal disorganization are the following:

1. Sex Offenders: Rape, sodomy, bestially, homoerotism, pedophilia, plural sex, oral-genital contacts are some of the examples of sexually deviant behaviour. A person addicted to any of these and preferring them to heterosexuality is an unstable person. Incest, that is, sexual contact between mother-son or father-daughter or brother-sister is a heinous act and is bound to affect the personality adversely.

2. Prostitution: Both prostitute and her patrons are liable to be unstable. Sex without love may not upset some highly sophisticated persons but on the whole, a feeling of guilt is felt by all such persons. In countries where prostitution is outlawed, prostitutes ply their trade-in respectable areas and mix with all sorts of persons. These prostitutes may corrupt others. The persons who visit prostitutes are frustrated in their sex life but commercial sex can help them little. It only aggravates their emotional conflict.

3. Alcoholism and Drug-addiction: man drinks or eats LSD, marijuana or smokes ganja or swallows amphetamines and barbiturates, in order to escape from the realities of life and live in spurious heaven. But these trips can be short-lived and can only intensify the problems. Thus these things are poisons of the soul. Their moderate use may be condoned but any excess in this matter is injurious to both body and mind.

4. Suicide: Suicide is the most vicious form of personal disorganization. According to Durkheim, there are four types of suicide:

1. Egoistic Suicide

2. Altruistic Suicide

3. Anomic Suicide

4. Fatalistic Suicide

The last type is due to social disorganization.

5. Juvenile Delinquency: Social and family disorganization affect young people most. The children coming from slums and broken homes see all types of sex and crime while very young. Therefore, their minds are overexcited but immature. Thus they take to minor crimes and lead a life of vagabondage. They are unstable to seek adjustment with society.

CONSEQUENCES OF PERSONAL DISORGANIZATION

The consequence of personal disorganization affects the personality of the individual in several ways, let’s discuss the following:

1. Conflict aspects of personality: The consequence of personal disorganization developed in the first conception of himself which the individual achieves from him by the family group. It is here that the individual develops a personality and achieves status. He is no longer an organic entity who is only concerned with the satisfaction of physiological demands, but a person whose responses bring approval or disapproval. Slowly he has acquired the faculty of self-regarding as a counterpart of the regarding responses of others toward him.

2. Family aspects of personality: Family being the primary importance in the determination of the role of the child within the family is the order of birth. The first-born child has the unique experience of first being the only child and subsequently having his place as the centre of attention usurped by another. And while at first he tends to rebel against this usurpation, this loss of attention is compensated for shortly by the responsibilities he is permitted to assume and the dominance he is allowed to exercise over his younger brothers and sisters from time to time. The consequence is that dominance and responsibility are the outstanding traits of the oldest child, though often coloured by tendencies toward introspection and lack of self-confidence which hark back to his dethronement by the next born.

3. Insanity represents personal disorganization: Insanity are those cases which result from some partial destruction or impairment of the neutral system, and cases in which the disorder is functional. In general, functional insanity represents the extreme of personal disorganization, but there are exceptions, particularly those forms which are hereditary in character. For instance, alcoholism in its extreme forms and its related psychoses shows structural deterioration as a consequence of the use of alcohol as an escape mechanism. Drug addiction, and the psychoses which develop from the excessive use of drugs, belong in the same category.

4. Mental illness or conflict: The mental illness was caused due to biological and situational.  As per Queen and Mann share a majority of mental disorganization is the result of inability to adjust to the strains of modern life. The struggle for material possessions, the frustration of the job, aggression endangered by competitors, the migration which involves marked cultural adjustment, the pervasive attempt to rise in the social scale, unhappy family relations, these factors combine to increase the difficulty of living in the modern age and so on.

5. Suicide is an extreme form: According to Durkheim suicide is the term applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself which he knows will produce this result. If personal disorganization leads to insanity and finds no other choice because the group expects him to do so, it represents an index of social organization and group cohesion where the individual may kill himself.

Thus, personal disorganization refers to a breakdown in institutional control and group consensus. This disorganized person leads to an unbalanced, uncoordinated and one sided. This may grow into a gradual or a sudden, out of social disorganization and may further intensify to bring individual disorganization on a large scale.

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Personal Disorganization. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sociologyguide.com/social-pathology/personal-disorganization.php.

Social Disorganisation By Rajendra Kumar Sharma (pp. 52-53)

Indian Social Problems, Social Disorganization and Reconstruction By Gurmukh Ram Madan (pp. 32-54)