kazimierz dabrowski positive disintegration

Periods of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and extreme disorientation can occur - so much so that at times, it can look very much like pathology. This lack of predictability and control in the process, combined with the fact that we are literally 'disintegrating' personality-wise, can be very frightening and frustrating. This level has a 'spontaneous' quality to it, as we are not yet fully aware of how the climbing process works. This is when we start letting go of the societal and negatively self-centered 'baggage' that is holding us back from moving actively toward our ideal.

Levels 3 represents the start of the climb.

Some people see a mountain, but are too scared or otherwise blocked from starting the climb (Dabrowski's Level 2) Dabrowski called this a 'horizontal conflict' because it usually points to a person feeling so conflicted about how others perceive them or what others want (or society wants) from them, that they are unable to allow themselves to develop their own personality ideal based on their own values. Some people never develop a sense of inner, vertical conflict between who they are now (how their lives are now) and who they want to be (how they want their lives to be) so, they don't see a mountain to climb (this was Dabrowski's Level 1). In Living with Intensity, Daniels and Piechowski liken Dabrowski’s “multilevel journey” of self-actualization to the process of climbing a mountain. POSITIVE DISINTEGRATION: A MULTILEVEL JOURNEY However, some people - and some gifted people - are more primed to experience more tension than others, because their intensities (whatever they happen to be) cause them to reflect more on what needs to change, within themselves or within the world, in order for an equilibrium between themselves and the world to be found. To some degree, it is a basic mechanism of learning and growth. Obviously, anyone can experience this vertical tension - one need not be gifted or even 'uncommonly intense' to experience it.

This phrase “according to our own ideals” is a capital distinction in Dabrowski’s theory: by 'personality ideal', he wasn’t referring to the self as conformed to social or cultural norms, or any external authority, but the self as based on a self-chosen ideal. Through introspection, a sort of 'vertical tension' – an inner disharmony between what we are and what we believe we “ought to be” according to our own uncommonly intense ideals – arises. So why would heightened experience be the groundwork for self-actualization? Dabrowski felt that intense ways of being caused a sort of 'inner conflict', and this inner conflict generated a need for introspection. Here is a good explanation of how they differ, and why that difference is important to understand: Giftedness & Overexcitabilities. I want to note here that giftedness and overexcitabilities have often been conflated with giftedness in the giftedness literature. This is the start of the journey to self-actualization, or in Dabrowski's terms, the journey toward our personality ideal. Given that a gifted people have a heightened intellectual experience compared to the norm (intellectual overexcitability), the reasoning goes that a gifted person may be more likely to go through a 'positive disintegration'. To put Dabrowski’s theory in very simple terms, he believed that innately heightened – or intense – experience in these areas of overexcitability (particularly those of emotional, imaginational and intellectual) forms the basic groundwork for the complex process of working toward our personality ideal.

Kazimierz dabrowski positive disintegration