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Personality-shaping Through
Little, Brown and Company, Boston
Positive Disintegration Kazimierz Dąbrowski, M.D., Ph.D. Visiting Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Introduction by O. HOBART MOWRER, Ph.D. Research Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana
Copyright 1967 by Kazimierz Dąbrowski All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-16737 First Edition Published in Great Britain by J. & A. Churchill Ltd. London British Catalogue No. 7000 0101 8 Printed in the United States of America
Preface
PERSONALITY IS NOT A READY GIFT but an achievement. This achievement is a very difficult, even painful, process. The aim of this book is to describe and to discuss this process. Our personality is shaped throughout our lives; our inborn characteristics constitute the basis determining our potential for inner growth. The shaping of personality occurs under the influence of various external milieus. However, it is in the inner psychic milieu that the formative process takes place. The role of the inner psychic milieu is most significant in the accelerated development of psychically richer and more creative individuals. This means that our personality cannot be created or shaped by some external influence or process without our inner partici-
Preface pation. Such involvement is most clearly seen in the development of higher levels of personality. For this to happen we have to have an enhanced awareness, a sense of autonomy and authenticity of our own self. It will be shown in this work, on the basis of the author’s clinical experience and research, that certain psychic elements, such as various forms of overexcitability, germinal elements of the inner milieu, or nuclei of creative abilities, are essential for the formative process leading to the achievement of personality and must come with hereditary endowment. It is usually emphasized that the most important period determining the shaping of personality is the period when the infant “tries his own forces” against the outer environment. However, one must realize that a period even more important than that of early infancy is the period of “awakening” that brings about the development of the inner psychic milieu and its main dynamisms. Conflicts play an extremely important role in the development of personality. Of all types of conflicts the inner conflict is particularly significant. The same can be said about nervousness and psychoneurosis. Without the disturbance and disequilibrium brought about by nervousness and psychoneurosis, the process of personality development cannot be realized. This is because the dynamisms active in these departures from psychic equilibrium also contain the primary elements of creative development. The author’s basic thesis can be stated as follows: Personality development, especially accelerated development, cannot be realized without manifest nervousness and psychoneurosis. It is in this way that such experiences as inner conflict, sadness, anxiety, obsession, depression, and psychic tension all cooperate in the promotion of humanistic development. Those especially trying moments of life are indispensable for the shaping of personality. An effort to overcome and transform psychoneurotic dynamisms reveals the action of self-directing and self-determining dynamisms that make autopsychotherapy possible and successful. The difficult moments that promote personality growth generate psychic tension. We cannot, however, advise one to seek libvi
Preface eration from psychic tension since this very