So how did the concept of stress
come to be? The term “stress” was used as early as 1914 by Harvard physiologist
Walter Cannon. But his concept was different than ours today. As Becker notes
in One Nation Under Stress, “Cannon described stress in terms of heat,
hunger, oxygen deprivation and other phenomena that can cause predictable
physiological responses.”He concluded that in response to fear and fury, our
bodies released adrenalin and our heartbeat and blood sugar increased. But our
bodies would always return to “homeostasis,” or keep “on an even course.”
Remnants of this theory do live on today. According to Becker in her book:
“…it is generally agreed that, after
Cannon, all stress theories were based at least in part on his ideas about
homeostasis. Cannon’s work lives on in the popular idea that there is an
ongoing battle between our out-of-date physiology and the demands of modern
life. We make biological ‘adjustments’ that are no longer functional: we react
to an angry boss the way our Stone Age counterparts reacted to a saber-tooth
tiger, but we can’t run away…”It was Czech-born endocrinologist Hans Selye who
popularized the concept of stress. At first, Selye used the term “stress” much
like Cannon did. But by 1950, Becker writes, “he was describing stress as a
‘response to a condition evoked by stressors.’” In his book The Stress of
Life, which Selye penned for the public, he refers to stress as “the rate
of wear and tear caused by life.” He also made the connection between stress
and disease.
Selye was a master marketer of
stress. According to Becker in her book, “A tireless promoter of the stress
concept, Selye sold and resold it over the years in popular and professional
venues – in his best-selling books The Story of the Adaptation Syndrome and
The Stress of Life, in talks to doctors’ groups in Canada and the United
States, and at meetings of the American Psychological Association.But Selye was
so good that while the public accepted stress as a prominent concept, his
specific theories got lost. In fact, “…the ‘truth’ of the stress concept and
the American embrace of it did not come about through scientific agreement or
through medical cures for ‘stress-related’ diseases. It was stress’s popularity
that made it ‘true,’” Becker writes.
References
Freud, S. (1909b). Bemerkungen über
einen Fall von Zwangsneurose (Der "Rattenmann"). Jb. psychoanal.
psychopathol. Forsch., I, p. 357-421; GW, VII, p. 379-463; Notes upon a
case of obsessional neurosis, SE, 10: 151-318.
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