Nirvana's Kurt Cobain once famously sung a song called Something In The Way. Like a number of his tracks, it was a bit of a barbed response to his own fans with whom he had something of a love/hate relationship. The song highlights a rather sad character who has no coherent perspective on life and is living a drop-out hippy kind of lifestyle.
The notion of 'something in the way' could be applied to displacement behaviour too. In my view psychology is a bit too concerned with intra-psychic events (Freud's legacy) and not enough with environmental obstacles which affect mental health. Very often people grow up in situations where natural behaviours are obstructed or blocked from being expressed. It is the continued frustration of species specific behaviours at key points of development which can lead to brain re-wiring and maladaptive patterns developing.
For example, a parental figure who elicits both approach and withdraw behaviours can place a child in two minds, blocking the opportunity for secure attachment and creating a state of mind that requires a behaviour, such as hair pulling, in order to attain some measure of ease and comfort. Dysfunctional environments can be a real problem for young kids because they are at an age where they are trying to adapt, rather than challenge the physical limits of their world. Trying to make oneself fit a 'cage' that is not conducive to development can lead to all kinds of mental and emotional problems.
In this blog I contend that where normal behaviours lack the environmental basis for support or expression, the human brain develops its own strategies for achieving internal goal states, such as safety and comfort. The brain, being the amazing thing it is, may be successful in achieving the desired psychological effects it seeks but at the cost of producing distorted behaviour patterns. Viewed from outside the context in which they develop these can appear to make no sense whatsoever and offer no obvious benefits. Hair pulling is one such case in point.
So, maybe Kurt Cobain's song could have included another verse or two to reveal that a whole range of distortions can occur when something does get in the way of people being more adapted to the world. From psychology's perspective, these behaviours need to be judged from within the situation people find themselves and not solely from the outside if they are to be properly understood. In other words, instead of seeing these behaviours as merely problems, they should also be viewed in terms of the compensatory benefits they provide in reaction to a repressive environment.
