From the author: A little about infantilism and puerilism. Infantilism is “stuck” at the childhood stage of development. We are interested in psychological infantilism. What are the main childhood traits? Lack of responsibility as an understanding of causality. This includes: not taking into account the interests of other people (namely, taking into account, a person can take into account and decide to put a bolt, it will not be infantile, because he himself decided, this means not taking into account, i.e. the lack of a conscious analysis of the consequences of his actions), difficulty or inability to plan and think ahead (what I did today will affect me tomorrow), predominantly emotional reaction as a consequence of underdeveloped consciousness. Infantilism can be total, it can be partial. What does it mean? Conventionally, let’s divide our spheres of activity into 4 groups (taken from positive psychotherapy): activity (work), contacts (relationships), body and sphere of meaning (aka ideas, fantasies, “inner world”). If a person exhibits the traits of childish reactions in all areas, we speak of total infantilism; if only in some areas, we speak of partial infantilism. Usually, total infantilism is associated with mental illness, but sometimes it acts as an extreme degree of pedagogical neglect (when I was a psychiatrist, I saw children diagnosed with mental retardation who responded adequately to banal normal pedagogical services). Sometimes a child is unconsciously or consciously raised to be an infantile who “didn’t fly out of the nest.” As a rule, total infantilism can only be treated by complete abandonment, which parents rarely do (“he’ll be lost without us”). For me, a striking episode in practice was the story of one patient, a 72-year-old woman who complained about her alcoholic son. She told the following episode from her life: her child was sitting in the living room, watching football, and his mother was preparing soup in the kitchen. And so, the soup is ready, and the little girl shouts from the living room, “Mother, where is the soup? I want to eat." And so she puts the soup on a tray and brings it to him, and her arms are already weak, and she also has diabetic neuropathy. And her hands can’t hold the tray with soup, she drops it on the floor, the plate shatters, the soup is on the floor. The little girl starts shouting at her mother, saying, “Old lady, she ruined my soup.” And what do you think our mother is doing?... She begins to apologize, returns to the kitchen for a new plate, and then cleans up the spilled soup from the floor. The saddest thing is that I wasn’t even surprised by the story. Not such a rare case. By the way, the patient’s main question was not “Why the hell am I putting up with all this?”, but “Tell me how to help my son get rid of alcoholism?” With partial infantilism, of course, everything is not so gloomy. It looks something like this: a 30-year-old man, the head of a business, outwardly handsome, strong, but when he sees a girl, he begins to sweat, stutter and tremble. As if I was stuck at some stage (probably Freud would say so). It’s common for ways of responding to get stuck. Bodily reactions, emotions, deep-seated beliefs, cognitive distortions, etc.. And if it is extremely difficult to fight total infantilism (personally, I have been taking it for a long time with only one condition: the parent throws this person out into the street and agrees that, in extreme cases, the child dies in a ditch), then with a partial everything is simpler. And the more “partial” the infantilism is, the simpler it is. By the way, I often hear and read that many people wonder why successful people need the help of a psychotherapist. Are they supposed to be successful? Usually infantiles reason this way at the expense of youthful maximalism. An adult understands that even if he is a professor, an academician and God knows what credentials and abilities, he will still call a specialist to fix the washing machine. Puerilism is a method of psychological defense in the form of withdrawal into childhood. Essentially this is reactive hysterical psychosis. Such psychosis occurs as a way of protecting oneself from stimuli that are extreme for a given person. How infantilism and puerilism are related is an open question. In fact, infantilism is a property of a healthy psyche, while puerilism is already a borderline level (hysterical.