In this, the third and final chapter, we shall undertake the analysis of three themes, which describe alternative ways of applying to specific settings the theoretical concepts discussed thus far. If until now we have considered subjective experience from the point of view of its optimal configuration, subjective experience can also organize itself in a disturbed fashion. For instance, anxiety, boredom, and apathy represent times at which consciousness is not harmoniously regulated.

In the first section of this chapter, we shall discuss conditions under which this regulation fails in a serious way. We shall therefore tackle the problem of mental disturbance and psychopathology. In the second section, we shall explore the opposite case: we shall speak of some of these theories' suggestions regarding creative processes in real-life contexts. Finally, in the third section, we shall focus on daily mechanisms of cultural evolution and their relation to states of subjective experience. This section represents a starting point for the analysis of the general mechanisms through which individuals develop their personalities and, at the same time, through which human cultures are transmitted over time.

We shall place ourselves, once more, in the vast current of contemporary psychology that studies normal human beings in their daily existence.

QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH

Mental Disturbance as Psychic Entropy

We have pointed out several times that each individual internalizes daily part of the surrounding external culture by being in contact with the group to which he or she belongs.