On Personality Shaping Through Positive Disintegration

I think Dąbrowski is onto something here, but his approach leaves a lot to be desired. His starting point is the observation that many of us go through dark stretches in which we don’t sit well with ourselves — we feel a gulf between who we are and who we could be, and it tips into total despair. He calls this disintegration. In his system, everyone undergoes a first disintegration while maturing in adolescence (or earlier), and reintegrates around the norms and values of their society. But for some people — the gifted few, Dąbrowski argues — there comes a point in adulthood when they realize those norms and values are baseless, and they disintegrate again. When that happens, there are four ways out: suicide, psychosis, reintegration at the first level, or a new integration built around an individual hierarchy of values. That last is effectively self-actualization, and it’s immensely hard to reach; most who disintegrate a second time reintegrate at the primary level instead. He points to figures like Kierkegaard, Michelangelo, and Augustine, who went through the “darkness of the soul” and came out the better for it, and he adds that educating oneself about the process improves the odds.

For all intents and purposes, I think he’s right — except that I don’t believe the second integration is limited to a gifted few. Anyone can reach it with enough willpower, drive, and self-reflection. It’s hard work, and I feel like I’m in the thick of it now. Dąbrowski helped me make sense of what I’m going through, and it maps onto what others describe (Lacan’s subjective destitution, for one); it resonated with my own life. Still, his prose is DENSE, and the book was a slog.