HAMBURG 251human behavior as the general way in which we responded to stress
ful experience.
So we asked whether there might be other ways in which the human
organism coped with stressful experiences and began to investigate coping,
interpersonal problem solving, and adaptive behavior. In the early 1950s,
initially during the Korean War, at Brooke Army Hospital in Texas, par
ticularly in collaboration with my wife, Beatrix Hamburg, we started
this work with severely burned patients. A series of studies over the next
two decades explored the ways in which individuals drawn from a broad
range of the general population coped with difficult circumstances.
Some of these studies dealt with situations of life-threatening illness
and injury, such as severe burns; then severe poliomyelitis in the days
before the vaccine; and studies of childhood leukemia patients and their
parents at the NIH Clinical Center. There were also studies involving
psychosocial transitions that were not life-threatening in character, like
going away to college for youth who had not been away from home
much before, stressful but not intrinsically life-threatening. Much of
this research was done in the intramural program and in various field
locations derived from the intramural program.
These studies of coping behavior described how people actually seek
and utilize information under stressful conditions. We found that under
difficult circumstances, the human organism tends to seek information
about several questions: How can the distress be relieved? How can a sense
of personal worth be maintained? How can a rewarding continuity of
human relationships be maintained? How can the requirements of the
stressful task be met or the opportunities utilized?
Psychological preparation centers on the availability of time to answer
those questions prior to a threatening event. Then the blow, if it must
come, can be absorbed in the prospect of substitute, alternative sources
of self-esteem and rewarding interpersonal relationships. On the other
hand, if a threatening event occurs without warning, as in the situation
of sudden illness or injury, then the time for “preparation” is likely to be
bought by temporary self-deception, and here is where we get back into
the classical mechanisms of defense. In this way, by not recognizing right
away the gravity of the situation, the recognition of threatening elements
is made gradual and manageable. A time scale of weeks or a few months