So, negative entropy, or negentropy as he also termed it, is actually something positive. 9) in which the goal was to search for useful inputs to the sociocultural context, the physical environment, and into the organism down to the cellular level to counter the normal tendency of entropy. He presented the term negative entropy (Antonovsky, 1987, p. A more fruitful approach would be to focus on what he found to be the overall problem of active adaptation to an environment in which stressors are omnipresent and inevitable. He found it to be a futile task to try to understand and control every single factor that might lead to this or that particular disease. The release of Health, Stress and Coping in 1979 was a culmination of 15 years of work, during which he came to understand that disease, illness, and entropy (decline into disorder) are the norm rather than the exception to a rule of otherwise self-regulated homeostatic processes occasionally being disturbed with resulting pathology. In the SMH, there are important concepts, the development of which we trace in this chapter: stress, breakdown, resources, sense of coherence (SOC), and health.Īntonovsky departs, in his two major books (Antonovsky, 1979, 1987) from the traditional medical view of homeostasis being the basic human condition, and introduces the fundamental philosophical view of “ the human organism as prototypically being in the state of heterostatic disequilibrium as the heart of the salutogenic orientation” (Antonovsky, 1987, p. These papers come in addition to the publications in which he originally introduced his ideas. Papers written in his last years, in which he looks back and comments on how his thinking developed, have been of particular value. The chapter is based on the authorship of Antonovsky himself. 3 portrays Antonovsky, the man and the researcher, this chapter portrays the SMH and its development along with life events of its creator until the untimely death of Antonovsky in 1994. So was also the case with the development of the salutogenic model of health (SMH), a development described by Antonovsky himself in retrospect as a “personal odyssey” over decades (Antonovsky, 1990). Adventures along the road become the germ (to use Antonovsky’s own expression) of new ideas and layers of understanding. When a person thinks seriously about a topic over a period of about three decades, it is a sign of good thinking and personal development if, at the end of that period, he/she is no longer in total agreement with former ideas. I hope it will become clear in due course that my concern is no mere semantic quibble and that here, as in all of science, how one poses the question is crucial to the direction one takes in looking for the answers (Antonovsky, 1979, p.
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