I recently finished reading K. Dabrowski's second English book on his theory of positive disintegration. I was amazed at the similarities to the material we study on this forum, including Laura's work in the Wave, Gurdjieff, alchemy, psychopathy, etc. What follows are some excerpts that I underlined while reading the book. I've bolded some provocative portions.
Excerpts possibly relating to the "OP" hypothesis:
In the appendix to this book, Dabrowski cites a study he performed on a group of youths (age 8-23). He set out to determine if there was a correlation between pscyhoneuroses and giftedness. He found that this was so. Gifted individuals, with a highly developed inner psychic environment, as a rule are psychoneurotic to a certain extent. Equally as interesting were his findings for those who were not gifted.
Excerpts possibly relating to the "OP" hypothesis:
In the appendix to this book, Dabrowski cites a study he performed on a group of youths (age 8-23). He set out to determine if there was a correlation between pscyhoneuroses and giftedness. He found that this was so. Gifted individuals, with a highly developed inner psychic environment, as a rule are psychoneurotic to a certain extent. Equally as interesting were his findings for those who were not gifted.
Among the children and young people we examined, about half did not possess the distinct rudiments of a rich internal environment. It turned out that the quality of the structure of this environment was clearly correlated to the development and level of psychoneurosis.
Summing up these results we may state that, with all those examined, independent of the type of school, with the presence of a rich and developing internal environment, the number of anxiety and psychasthenic sets increases, but when such an environment is lacking, hysterical and neurasthenic symptoms dominate. (256)
1. When the organizing structure of personality is lacking, the degree of intensity of neurotic sets increases distinctly. Sets of a more intensive course but also of a lower level of disordered functions then appear.
2. Anxiety neurosis, in cases where the developed internal environment is lacking, may be light but it appears as a neurosis with more serious symptoms when the internal environment is developed, and then it is a disorder of the higher level function (existential anxieties). Moreover, it is a neurosis which has the tendency to appear whether the developed internal environment is lacking or present.
3. Hysteria, with very intensive symptoms and at a lower level of disordered functions, occurs most frequently when the internal environment is lacking, and vanishes almost completely when the internal environment is developing. The stronger the hysterical sets, the weaker the symptoms of other psychoneurotic sets. And likewise inversely. Hysteria occurs to a great extent irrespective of one’s age.
4. With older youths the degree of neurasthenia increases when the internal environment is lacking.
5. Psychasthenia tends to associate with more serious neurotic states of the following type: obsessions, neurasthenias, and anxiety neurosis.
6. Anxiety neurosis is the most “sociable,” the light symptoms of which associate with the stronger degrees of neuroses of the lower type, namely with vegetative neurosis and with hysteria. More serious anxiety neurosis associates with an increased intensity of psychoneuroses at a higher level. (257-8)
The lack of development of an internal environment (and therefore, indirectly, a greater tendency to psychoneurotic sets of the hysteric and neurasthenic type) is connected with certain attributes of thinking, such as the predominance of practical intelligence, a weak ability for the mechanical memorization of numbers, weak abstract and symbolic thinking, rigidity of intellectual content, stereotyped thinking, fastidiousness, weak conceptual analysis and thinking, chaos, an agglutinative character of thinking, an inability to concentrate, such qualities as criticism, correct judgment of the situation, visual-motor coordination, artistic intuition, the dominant role of impressions in artistic thinking.
The arising internal environment, in which the sets of psychasthenia and anxiety neurosis appear frequently, is associated with such qualities as the tendency to confabulate and to make generalizations, gaudiness, originality, richness and plasticity of intellectual contents, an ability for abstract thinking, the less frequent occurrence of stereotyped and chaotic thinking, correct logical thinking, a good knowledge and vocabulary, good mathematical and symbolic reasoning, magical thinking, perseveration, and difficulties in concentration. (258-9)
The need for introspection:1. All gifted children and young people display symptoms of increased psychoneurotic excitability, or lighter or more serious psychoneurotic symptoms.
2. In general the presence of all-around interests in children and young people coincides with complicated forms of psychoneurosis, with psychoneuroses of higher hierarchical system of functions (psychasthenia, anxiety neurosis, obsessive neurosis) or with a higher level of the same kind of neurosis.
3. Psychoneurosis becomes more complicated with the development of the internal environment, but at the same time there appear autopsychotherapeutic dynamisms.
4. The development of personality with gifted children and young people usually passes through the process of positive disintegration, which is connected with the already mentioned complexity of neurosis, and on the other hand it leads to self-control, self-education, and autopsychotherapy.
5. The lower the level of the development of personality and intelligence, the more primitive the forms of psychoneurosis observed (up to its absence in more serious cases of mental deficiency). (260-1)
The battle of the two natures:People who do not feel any need for solitude, or cannot bear it, are wholly extroverted and unprepared for psychic transformation. (33)
Psychopathy:In the light of introspection we see that this new structure--which consciously takes part in matters concerning its own evolution and which acts as a "third factor" [the first two being genes and environment] in the shaping of the personality--clearly rises in conflict with the fundamental instincts of our biological "i" and in conflict with the common forms of reaction of a social group, and creates its own extrabiological and extrasocial aims. (41)
Developmental Potential:Integrated structures are also encountered among psychopathic individuals who, believing their morbid tendencies are hierarchically superior, subordinate to them all other dispositions and functions, adapting them more or less adroitly to the environment. A psychopathic individual usually does not know the feeling of internal inferiority, does not experience internal conflicts; he is unequivocally integrated.
The kinds of integration just mentioned might be called, in the most general sense, primary, nonevolutional forms of integration. When an individual with a tenacious structure goes through typical, general biological phases, when unilateral interests develop in him, or so-called “normal” inclinations, or when possibly his psychopathological structure is “improved,” this does not mean that he actually develops, but that he merely attains this or that kind of ability, this or that form of the “art of living.” (56)
Subjective "Debating":The feeling of inferiority in relation to oneself is manifested, as a rule, by individuals with the capacity for distinct, accelerated development, in neuroses, psychoneuroses, and sometimes in psychoses, butit is never observed in psychopathy and with persons offering no promise for the development of personality. (100)
Self-Knowledge and External Consideration:The conflict of the material interests of individuals and groups in the world of organized communities leads in general to the use of more or less camouflaged threats, various systems of propaganda, and different forms of ideological fighting. At a considerably higher level there occurs a clash of opinions, convictions, and views. However, we usually also contact at this stage subjective arguments of the opponents, which are based on material and personal interests involving prestige. The fighting individuals or parties look for the weak points of their adversaries, direct the “spears” of their arguments, not to the essence of the matter, but to points which are in fact secondary, and whose importance for the problem is only apparent. Socratic irony used in such cases does not aim at bringing to light essential truth, but only such “truth” as a fighting individual or party wants to prove. (116)
"Free" Will and Determinism:one cannot learn to know, understand, and “feel” other people in their individual types, in the scale of their development, in the variety of their affectional attitudes, without the ability to observe one’s own reactions, experiences, affectional states, tensions, and conflicts. Only the appraisal and structuring of one’s own inner milieu and one’s behavior, connected therewith, gives the necessary empirical measure of feeling and understanding of others. The love of one’s neighbor is based on the ability to “equorize” the whole history of one’s experiences, the whole vast area of introspection; it is the ability for consonance, with a continuously increasing participation of consciousness. (118)
At the lower levels of human life volition is not free, but it forms a whole with a drive which manifests itself as such with greater or lesser intensity in a wider or narrower area of individual or group life. Nietzsche sees this problem as follows:
One man is dominated by a need in the form of a passion, another by the habit of obedience, a third by his logical conscience, and a fourth by a whim and licentious satisfaction, because of his deflection from the way. All of them, however, will seek freedom of their volition just where each of them is most strongly tied: this is as if the silkworm sought the freedom of its volition in the spinning of silk. Where does it come from? Obviously from the fact that everyone of us considers himself most free just where his feeling of life is the greatest, that is, as has been said, in passion, or in duty, or in cognition, or in licentiousness. [(9)]
At a higher level of development it is not the volition, but the personality that is free. In the first case “volition” reflects an integrated instinct or instincts. When these instincts lose their integrality, they begin to demonstrate clearly the action of volition. In the second case it reflects a psyche integrated at a higher level. In the period of disintegration it manifests itself in distractions and collisions and it is a function of disintegrated dynamisms, which tend to secondary integration, to personality; volition then becomes a function which ever more identifies itself with the very personality, and thereby becomes increasingly less “free.” (124-5)
Sin:In the psychophysiological structure of man, the problem of “free will” arises only at the level of disintegrative, introspective activities. One can hardly speak of free will in almost automatic instinctive attitudes. In man’s cycle of development we may speak rather of the process of “growing richer” in freedom. The development of man proceeds from biological determination to psychological indeterminacy (the phase of developmental disintegration) and then to secondary moral “determination” (the secondary phase). We may, therefore, say that in the middle phase we have an unsteady will, and in both extreme phases free will experientially does not exist. (132)
200 Conscious Individuals?We may say that at the level of primitive instinctive integration there is no sin, but only offenses and evil. At the level of positive disintegration we experience the feeling of sin and misdemeanor. On the other hand, at the level of secondary integration there is no evil or misdemeanor, but a strong feeling of sin. (131)
6%'ers:the possession of the greatest possible number of matured personalities by a society is decisive for its proper development, for its place in the family of societies, for its future. . . . [A]id in this development by a competent person is advisable, and often necessary. (145, 146)
Conscious Suffering:The study of historical personalities therefore gives us, by contrast, insight into the structure and dynamisms of outstanding criminal individuals and shows us the following fundamental differences: the criminal individual reveals intelligence functions closely linked with primitive instincts; this is an intelligence in the service of instincts; the outstanding criminal individuals are “deaf and dumb” to aims and values other than their own, to the realization of which they often fanatically subordinate themselves; at the root of the activity of such individuals there is sometimes a morbid ambitional or imaginational nucleus. (203)
And as a preview, here's a bit from Dabrowski's third book:Suffering elevates a man, ennobles his spirit, but this takes place only in cases of active suffering, as a result of conscious will and an effort to sacrifice oneself in the name of a higher ideal. (229)
The second objection concerns antirelativism in matters of value [i.e. the idea that values and morality are not relative, but universal]. It is this writer’s opinion that empirical evaluation of emotions and instincts is inseparable from an empirical study of human development. It is being contended in this book that an empirical investigation of multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions is possible [i.e. there is a difference between lower instincts and drives and higher ones]. The higher is the level of those functions in a person, the higher is his authentism, his self control the capacity for identification and empathy. This means that the higher is the level of universal development of a group of individuals, the more unanimous and objective are their value judgments. In the same way in which we can describe and measure emotional and instinctive functions, we can describe and measure the various hierarchies of aims associated with specific levels of emotional and instinctive functions. The point which deserves special emphasis is that there exists a distinct empirically testable connection between definite levels of mental development, especially between levels of emotional and instinctive functions, on one hand, and definite aims and norms of conduct, accepted by a person, on the other hand. These levels of emotional functions, aims and norms are accompanied by experiences of values which are not accessible to empirical verification, comparable in precision to the testing of levels of emotions and instincts. The higher is the level of a fully rounded mental development, the richer and more systematic are the accompanying experiences of values.
“Antirelativism” represented here with regard to developmental levels of emotions and aims implies the rejection of
regard to value judgments. This is of utmost importance in matters of moral, social and philosophical controversies. If there are significant differences in the degree of mental development of human individuals, if these differences are distinctly observable in the sphere of emotions and instincts, and consequently, if there are developmental differences between the manner of valuation characteristic for primitive and for mentally refined individuals, then there is no reason to put on an equal foot the opposite conceptions of what is right and what is wrong. The relativistic idea that value judgments of each human individual count the same, the idea that there is a kind of “equality” in valuation among men, is not only completely mistaken, but leads to manslaughter on a mass scale, and even genocide.
