Googling “symptom substitution” lead me to a journal article that argued that people have tried and failed to find evidence that it happens...
That’s Freudian symptom substitution, and in any case, the article is splitting hairs: it says that if you stop a child sucking its thumb, and it finds some other way to get its needs met, then that doesn’t count as “symptom substitution”. (IOW, the authors of the paper more or less defined it into nonexistence, such that if it exists and makes sense, it’s not symptom substitution!)
Also, the paper raises the same objection to the Freudian model of symptom substitution that I do: namely, that there is no explanation of the time frame factor.
In contrast, PCT unifies the cases both ruled-in and ruled out by this paper, and offers a better explanation for the varying time frame issue, in that the time frame is governed by the perceptual decay of the controlled variable.
That’s Freudian symptom substitution, and in any case, the article is splitting hairs: it says that if you stop a child sucking its thumb, and it finds some other way to get its needs met, then that doesn’t count as “symptom substitution”. (IOW, the authors of the paper more or less defined it into nonexistence, such that if it exists and makes sense, it’s not symptom substitution!)
Also, the paper raises the same objection to the Freudian model of symptom substitution that I do: namely, that there is no explanation of the time frame factor.
In contrast, PCT unifies the cases both ruled-in and ruled out by this paper, and offers a better explanation for the varying time frame issue, in that the time frame is governed by the perceptual decay of the controlled variable.