Dictionary:

facilitation

  (fə-sĭl'ĭ-tā'shən)

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1. 1. The act of making easy or easier.
   2. The state of being made easy or easier.
2. Physiology. The process of lowering the threshold for propagation of the action potential of a neuron, especially by repeated use of a neural pathway or the summation of two or more subthreshold impulses.

The reinforcement of a lower level nerve stimulus by a higher level nerve stimulus. Thus a reflex that cannot be elicited by a subliminal impulse may be reinforced by an additional stimulus from a higher center. The combined effect of the two stimuli may cause a reflex response.

Facilitation refers to the repeated passage of an excitation along the same pathway; this brings about a gradual and permanent decrease in resistance to this progression, and thus this channel develops into the preferred pathway for future excitations.

This term was used very early by Sigmund Freud (1888r, 1892g, 1893k). In the first article, Freud contrasts "facilitation and inhibition" to "reflex" and, in the two other articles, he separates "facilitation" and "inhibition" as the two modes of reflex transmission. The maximal usage of the term, as defined above, is found in Freud's 1895 "Project for a Scientific Psychology," with its neurological model of mental functioning.

Josef Breuer, in the Studies on Hysteria (1895), mentions the "attentional facilitation" invoked by Sigmund Exner (1894), who was dealing with the problem of energy and considered attentional facilitation to be pathological. In the "Project for a Scientific Psychology," Freud reworked the same notion differently to describe learning operations at the level of the "w neurons"and the memory, which tends to establish a type of operations similar to those of the ψ system governed by the principle of inertia. In this text, facilitation is conceived as a sort of double of the process of cathexis, the other important element in the management of bound energy.

Subsequently, Freud all but abandoned the term facilitation, which he uses only three times in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), where he opposes it to "resistance," and a final time in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920g), where facilitation is defined as a "permanent trace of the excitation" (p. 26) obtained through a decrease in the resistance against the progression of excitation.

Bibliography

Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.

Exner, Sigmund. (1894). Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen. Vienna.

Freud, Sigmund. (1888r). Rezension von: Phisalix, [CésaireAuguste], Sur les nerfs craniens d'un embryon humain de trente-deux jours (Compt. rend. CIV, 4, p. 241). In: Zbl. Physiol., Bd. 1, S. 268.

——. (1892g). Rezension von: Sternberg, [Maximilian], Hemmung, Ermüdung und Bahnung der Sehnenreflexe im Rückenmark (Wiener Akad. Sitzber. Juni 1891). In: Zbl. Physiol., Bd. 5, S. 859f.

——. (1893k). Rezension von: Sternberg, M[aximilian], Über die Beziehungen der Sehnenreflexe zum Muskeltonus (Wiener Akad. Sitzber. Juni 1891). In: Zbl. Physiol., Bd. 6, S. 24.

——. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE,4: 1-338; Part II, SE, 5: 339-625.

——. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 7-64.

——. (1950c [1895]). Project for a scientific psychology. SE, 1: 281-387.

—BERTRAND VICHYN

In criminal law, a statutory offense rendering one guilty when, believing it probable that one is aiding a person who intends to commit a crime, one engages in conduct which assists that person in obtaining the means or opportunity to commit the crime and in fact one's conduct does aid the person to so commit it. See N.Y. Penal Law §115. For example, if a store owner sells a gun to someone who is enraged and uttering threats about killing a third party, the store owner may be guilty of criminal facilitation. At common law, knowing facilitation may give rise to liability for aiding and abetting if the requisite mens rea can be established for the accessorial liability, but there was no distinct offense of criminal facilitation as such at common law. Compare accomplice; conspiracy.

Hastening or assistance of a natural process; the increased excitability of a neuron after stimulation by a subthreshold presynaptic impulse. The resistance is diminished so that second application of the stimulus evokes the reaction more easily.

The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes easy the tasks of others. For example:

• Facilitation is used in business and organisational settings to ensure the designing and running of successful meetings.
• Neural facilitation in neuroscience, is the increase in postsynaptic potential evoked by a 2nd impulse.
• Ecological facilitation describes how an organism profits from the presence of another. Examples are nurse plants, which provide shade for new seedlings or saplings (e.g. using an orange tree to provide shade for a newly planted coffee plant), or plants providing shelter from wind chill in arctic environments.

A person who takes on such a role is called a facilitator. Specifically:

• A facilitator is used in a variety of group settings, including business and other organisations to describe someone whose role it is to work with group processes to ensure meetings run well and achieve a high degree of consensus.
• The term facilitator is used in psychotherapy where the role is more to help group members become aware of the feelings they hold for one another (see Group therapy)
• The term facilitator is used in education to refer to a specifically trained adult who sits in class with a disabled, or otherwise needy, student to help them follow the lesson that the teacher is giving (see Disability)
• The term facilitator is used to describe people engaged in the illegal trafficking of human beings across international borders (see Trafficking in human beings).
• The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters.
• The term facilitator is used to describe someone who assists people with communication disorders to use communication aids with their hands. See Facilitated communication

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