ABSTRACT
Since calamities disturb acutely emotional and affective life, they cannot fail to influence the cognitive processes, beginning with the simplest, such as sensation and perception, memory and imagination, and ending with the most complex processes of creative thought. These effects present many factors which are essentially similar. This chapter concentrates upon these similarities. Intense starvation frequently leads to a weakening of the unity and integrity of the "self," which tends to become amorphous and split into two or more "selves," often at war with one another. In the field of desires and wishes and that of will and volition, the principal change brought about by calamities consists in a reinforcement of the desires and wishes directed toward the mitigation of the calamity and the sufferings imposed by it and in a corresponding weakening or elimination of all contrary desires and wishes.
