Changing Is Not Replacing — Problems Transformed into Justifications

Being-in-the-world implies changing, moving, and the continuity of change is fundamental, since human development is a continuation of denied theses, affirmed antitheses, syntheses constituting new theses, antitheses, etc.

in other words, human development is change, it is overcoming the established, the context of adjustment; it is updating oneself, responding to the questions, to the stimuli of being-in-the-world.

Change not always encompasses the scope of availability and, although it is always decontextualization, it can create maintenance or a rigid organization. In divided structures, pulverized in symptoms, change can correspond to the neutralization of possibilities, where problems are transformed into justifications and then stagnation establishes itself, positioning arise, creating static perceptual contexts, which are autoreferenced.

In situations of permanence and stagnation, there are exchanges, which do not correspond to changes, only substitutions. When the contexts remain, everything is perceived as a function of this permanence.

All perception (Gestalt Psychology) is given in terms of Figure/Ground, we perceive the Figural element, while the Background (Ground) is never perceived, although it is the contextual structuring of perception; there is reversibility, which means Figure turns into Ground and vice-versa: we perceive a person in the street, for example, the person is Figure and the street is Ground; when the attention is focused on the street, the street becomes Figure and the person becomes Ground.

This reversibility is the dynamics of the perceptual process. Staticism breaks the dynamics, generating the permanence of the Ground, of the frame, creating a series of stigmas, of prejudices, as much as certainties and confidence.

To think of someone as ‘coming from a good family’, being ‘good-looking’, always gentle, polite, without realizing that the person may be a manipulator, a stubborn liar – even when being a direct victim of his/her manipulations – is a very common example of perceptual stagnation: the determinant of perception is the maintained frame (‘good family’, ‘good-looking’, ‘gentle’, ‘polite’).

Everything is perceived in the context of this variation: transformation of what is evident, contrary to all previous certainties, into irrelevant data.