The concept of alloplastic adaptation was developed by Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Franz Alexander.
They proposed that when an individual was presented with a stressful situation, he could react in one of two ways: 'These terms are possibly due to Ferenczi, who used them in a paper on "The Phenomenon of Hysterical Materialization" (1919,24).
Ferenczi linked 'the purely "autoplastic" tricks of the hysteric...[to] the bodily performances of "artists" and actors'.
[3] A few years later, in his paper on "The Neurotic Character" (1930), Alexander described 'a type of neurosis in which...the patient's entire life consists of actions not adapted to reality but rather aimed at relieving unconscious tensions'.
[4] Alexander considered that 'neurotic characters of this type are more easily accessible to psychoanalysis than patients with symptom neuroses...[due] to the fact that in the latter the patient has regressed from alloplasticity to autoplasticity; after successful analysis he must pluck up courage to take action in real life'.