Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration (TPD) (Dabrowski 1964, 1967, 1970, 1972), while largely unknown in education, psychology and psychiatry, has found a home in gifted education. It has been used to address various aspects of gifted students’ functioning, including emotional sensitivity and intensity; misdiagnosis of conditions, such as ADHD; creative personality; spiritual development and counselling. Arguably, TPD has implications for the education of gifted students, but it provides no strategies or techniques that can be readily applied to the classroom. This cannot be used to criticize TPD because Dabrowski, a psychiatrist and psychologist, was primarily concerned with personality development and psychotherapy. In the absence of a comprehensive theory of giftedness, TPD offers a significant contribution to gifted education by providing provocative concepts that shed light on the affective aspects of gifted persons while simultaneously requiring an examination of our notions of giftedness itself. This article presents elements of TPD that have deepened my understanding of gifted persons and that may prove useful for educators. A theme in my presentation is that TPD is a theory of personality development. As such, TPD is neither a theory of giftedness nor a theory of emotional development. It is a comprehensive, complex theory with far-reaching implications for understanding human development in general.
TPD: What’s in a Name?
It is worth beginning with spelling out TPD again: theory of positive disintegration. In gifted education, theory of positive disintegration is used, but the most prolific writers in the area have reified the label Dabrowski’s theory of emotional development. Dabrowski proposes a comprehensive theory of personality development. His aims were more ambitious than helping us understand the intense positive and negative feelings witnessed in many gifted students, although his concepts are helpful in this area. In addition, he had little to say about emotional development in the sense that is used in developmental psychology. Viewing TPD as a theory of emotional development obscures a cornerstone of Dabrowski’s theory: positive disintegration.
In Dabrowski’s theory, positive disintegration is the process by which development occurs. For Dabrowski, growth occurs through a series of psychological disintegrations and reintegrations, resulting in dramatic change to a person’s conceptions of self and the world. Positive disintegration forges a personality that motivates one to perform at increasingly high levels, emphasizing altruism and morality. However, not all disintegrations are positive. When negative disintegrations occur, psychoses or suicide may be the outcome. An important theme of TPD is the movement from an initial egocentric approach to life to an altruistic one. The factors needed for positive disintegration and their operation are primary concerns of TPD.
Positive disintegration propels a person to TPD’s higher levels of development. There are five levels of development: initial or primary integration; three levels referring to increasing complexity of disintegration called unilevel, spontaneous multilevel and organized multilevel; and secondary integration that refers to the highest level. Levels of development may lead one to believe that TPD is a type of stage theory similar to well-known theories of development, such as Erikson’s theory of life span development and Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. There are some significant differences between Dabrowski’s use of level and the notion of stage. For one thing, progression beyond level one, primary integration, is by no means universal in the population. In addition, progression through the levels is not accomplished in a linear, invariant sequence. The concept of level allows for progression and regression, for unique patterns of development.
TPD is not a theory of emotional development, though it provides some useful insights into emotionality. Dabrowski’s theory describes how human beings transform themselves from self-serving, conforming individuals to self-aware, self-directed persons who transcend their primitive natures and strive to “walk the moral talk.” Certain prerequisites are needed for the journey from egocentrism to altruism. One is familiar to us, namely, a facilitative social environment; the other, developmental potential, is unique to TPD.
Developmental Potential: Beyond the OEs Lie Complexity and Controversy
Overexcitabilities (OEs) are by far the most frequently encountered components of TPD but they are often presented out of the context in which TPD discusses them. Dabrowski’s notion of overexcitability is anchored to the sensitivity of the nervous system and is seen as above-average responsiveness to stimuli.
Overexcitability (OE) is a fundamental but not a sole indicator of the foundational concept of developmental potential. OE has five manifestations: psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, intellectual and emotional.
Psychomotor: movement, restlessness, drivenness, an augmented capacity for being active and energetic.
Sensual: enhanced differentiation and aliveness of sensual experience.
Imaginational: vividness of imagery, richness of association, facility for dreams, fantasies, and inventions, animisms and personifications, liking the unusual.
Intellectual: avidity for knowledge, discovery, questioning, love of ideas and theoretical analysis, search for truth.
Emotional: great depth and intensity of emotional life expressed in a wide range of feelings, compassion, attachments, heightened sense of responsibility, self-examination.
Overexcitability is not unique to gifted persons. In TPD, OE indicates the level of developmental potential applicable to the general population. The number and levels of OEs in persons affect their experiencing. When all five are present, emotional intensity results: these overexcitabilities, especially the intellectual, imaginational, and emotional, often cause a person to experience day to day life more intensely and to feel the extremes of the joys and sorrows of life profoundly.
Complexity
OEs are only part of a central concept of developmental potential. For Dabrowski, developmental potential includes OEs, special abilities and talents, and the third factor. While the meaning of the second component makes intuitive sense, the third factor is more elusive. Its appearance is to some extent dependent on inherited abilities and on environmental experiences, but as it develops it achieves an independence from these factors through conscious differentiation and self-definition.
Piechowski interprets developmental potential as consisting of OEs and autonomous inner forces called dynamisms. Dynamisms are central, but rarely discussed, components of TPD. Dynamisms are forces that drive disintegration and reintegrations of psychological structures. Despite the importance of these autonomous inner forces as evidenced by Dabrowski’s own writings and in his coauthored volumes with Piechowski, little reference is made to them in more recent discussions of TPD in gifted education.
Dynamisms are forces of development that drive the process of positive disintegration and assist in actualizing persons’ endowment of developmental potential. Dynamisms are forces, biological or mental in nature, that control behavior and its development. Dabrowski describes them as instincts, drives and intellectual processes combined with emotions. Some dynamisms refer explicitly to a person’s experiencing intense negative emotions, such as guilt and shame. Experience of chronic, intense negative emotions contribute to shattering a person’s picture of his or her lifestyle and spark changes in perceptions and attitudes toward self and the social environment. In other words, such people become aware of their implicit worldviews that have led to their complacency and conformity, and they become transformed through dynamisms, including dissatisfaction with self and empathy. Those with the highest levels of developmental potential may reach level four, organized multilevel disintegration, where through dynamisms such as autopsychotherapy they take control over their own personality development. At this level, persons transcend their primitive instincts and drives and achieve a highly developed sense of morality. In the highest level of development, secondary integration, rarely achieved and represented by society’s exemplars, the person enacts his or her personality ideal whose hallmark is dedication to serving humanity.
Controversy
While dynamisms receive some mention in recent literature in gifted education, an important assumption associated with developmental potential is not apparent. Dabrowski proposes that developmental potential is determined by heredity and fixed at birth. According to TPD, we are all born with a certain level of developmental potential. Whether the level is low, moderate or high, it is out of our control. While our level of developmental potential interacts with the environment, the environment cannot alter the level we inherited. In this sense, developmental potential is analogous to intelligence. Both are genetically determined but influenced significantly by the environment.
Although developmental potential is not quantified in TPD, positive disintegration requires more than low levels of developmental potential. To attain levels beyond primary integration, moderate to high levels of developmental potential are needed. Dabrowski argues that the highest level of development, secondary integration, is rarely achieved. At those lofty heights of human development, we would likely find people such as Mother Teresa. Dabrowski himself said that he had not met a person who achieved secondary integration. Regardless of the quality of the social environment, limits of development are set by hereditary factors.
This means that we are born with a varying number and level of OEs. Dabrowski did not elaborate on this. For example, he did not provide profiles of persons with only two OEs or a metric with which we can readily assess either the presence or the levels of OEs. It is clear, however, that TPD requires that all five OEs be present, with three occurring in high levels, for advanced human development to take place: emotional, imaginational and intellectual overexcitability are the richer forms. If they appear together, they give rich possibilities of development and creativity.
In TPD, OEs are only part of the developmental potential concept. If we are interested in applying TPD to gifted students, we need to go beyond the OEs. Dabrowski’s OEs are not gifts that can be created by people in a social environment, no matter how loving and supportive it may be. To be sure, the quality of the social environment is implicated in their elicitation, but not in their creation. OEs, as part of developmental potential, are created by heredity, not by facilitative parents or educators. One implication of adopting a Dabrowskian perspective is that we must divest ourselves of the notion that all persons can be gifted in the sense of TPD’s potential for advanced development.
Positive Disintegration and Personality Development: No Emotional Pain, No Developmental Gain
Positive disintegration is an emotionally painful process resulting in psychological reintegration at a higher level of human functioning. Experiencing negative emotions, such as shame, guilt and anxiety, under certain conditions is indicative of positive disintegration. However, we need to see emotions in the context of developmental potential. When developmental potential is low, emotions, including intense negative emotions, are simply experienced with short-term effects on a person. In contrast, intense emotionality in the context of high OEs yields profound, life-changing experiences contributing to positive disintegration. Inner conflict is associated with such intense emotionality: life events and introspection become catalysts to painful experiencing of the discrepancy between the way the world ought to be and the way it is.
Negative emotions triggered by inner conflict propel a person into higher levels of personality structures. In other words, these negative emotions are part of positive disintegration. As such, they do not require fixing. Whereas prevailing wisdom suggests that we intervene at such times to remove the emotional distress, Dabrowski advocates an acceptance of these intense negative emotions. Our interventions should be aimed at helping people understand their emotions in the context of TPD principles. Dabrowski’s psychotherapeutic interventions included a didactic use of TPD with patients. I should reiterate the type of emotionality involved here: emotions sparked by inner conflict, not by self-interest. Educators know firsthand of the range of emotions expressed by students. My guess is that few emotional expressions of students would qualify as being motivated by inner conflict. Experienced educators can instinctively differentiate between self-serving, manipulative emotions and genuine indicators of growth in the Dabrowskian sense of development.
In addition to being a theory of personality development, TPD is a theory of moral development. Unlike Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, which focuses on the development of moral reasoning, Dabrowski focuses on moral behavior – inner conflict serves a motivational purpose. As awareness of how the world ought to be leads to preoccupation with what is good and right, personal values become transformed by an empathic connection with persons as individuals and in the form of humanity as a whole. Self-interest and gratification of drives give way to altruism. While gifted persons may display moral attitudes, a Dabrowskian perspective is not captured by current definitions of gifted used in most school jurisdictions.
TPD and Giftedness
Dabrowski was aware of the term gifted as it is generally used in gifted education. However, it is difficult to support that high developmental potential is equivalent to gifted as currently used in gifted education programs. Definitions that emphasize multidimensional potential or performance do not capture the Dabrowskian view of high potential for advanced development that is premised on high levels of OEs and the presence of dynamisms, among other factors. Even with the addition of affective characteristics, such as heightened sensitivity, self-criticism, spirituality and emotional intensity, we cannot approximate the advanced human functioning characteristic of those who undergo a series of positive disintegrations. Being gifted for a gifted program requires the meeting of specific criteria, which normally include high intellectual potential or demonstrated high level of ability/performance in areas associated with schools. This is not sufficient to capture giftedness in a Dabrowskian sense. The closest term is “high developmental potential.” The common notion of potential emphasizes the importance of the environment in which it will be actualized. However, giftedness and high developmental potential are qualitatively different concepts.
Because of my study of both gifted education and TPD, I have concluded that persons characterized by Dabrowski’s high developmental potential do not necessarily meet criteria for gifted programs. It is worth reiterating that TPD is not a theory of giftedness; gifted education is an area where it is applied. Those who qualify for a gifted education program may not be gifted in a Dabrowskian sense: not every student in a gifted program possesses high developmental potential. Society’s villains can be used to illustrate this point. Some notorious historical figures as well as current master criminals would likely meet criteria for gifted education programs. People such as Adolf Hitler would certainly not meet the Dabrowskian criteria – Hitler would not be an example of someone who was high on emotional overexcitability and dynamisms such as empathy, which are prerequisites for advanced human development for Dabrowski. The presence of potential for advanced development is not subsumed under the concept of giftedness as it is currently defined in school jurisdictions.
Summary
Four issues relating to TPD have been discussed. First, the name of the theory matters: positive disintegration is a foundation upon which TPD is built and calling it emotional development does not adequately reflect the theory. Second, OEs are only part of a larger concept of developmental potential that includes special abilities and talents, third factor and dynamisms. Third, intense negative emotions are part of the growth process but must emanate from inner conflict rather than selfish interests. Fourth, persons endowed with high developmental potential have the capability of achieving higher levels of development, which is not synonymous with current conceptions of giftedness.
Implications for Educators
Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is a complex, comprehensive theory of human development with direct implications for psychotherapy. Dabrowski’s primary goal was not to propose strategies for improving classroom practices. Reading Dabrowski’s original works will enable interested educators to generate their own interpretations of TPD and draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile, some practical implications follow.
Positive Disintegration and Development
TPD requires a reconsideration of the teacher’s role in contributing to the development of students. Unless we are willing to orchestrate crises in students’ lives (which is not recommended), we cannot activate development in the Dabrowskian sense. This places educators in a responsive, rather than an initiating, role. Responsiveness does not mean passivity; it requires knowing students, recognizing signs of growth and having the courage and skills to facilitate it. Seeing life events as opportunities for personal growth in gifted students is a contribution of TPD and can shape how educators respond.
Developmental Potential
Overexcitabilities are not simple concepts in TPD. They, with other factors, constitute a student’s developmental potential. Educators are important people in gifted students’ social environments. The manner in which we interact with all students contributes significantly to creating a positive, constructive environment in classrooms. Students with high developmental potential will pose challenges: psychomotor OE may resemble ADHD; intellectual OE may result in incessant questioning; emotional OE may create intense emotionality due to concern with global events.
Negative Emotions
Gifted students’ expressions of negative emotions pose challenges to educators. Appropriate direct expressions of feelings are generally manageable; the challenges are masked, inappropriately expressed or manipulative emotions. Avoiding misinterpretation requires perception checking with students. TPD does not suggest all emotionality should be accepted uncritically; to indicate growth, emotionality must arise from inner conflict, not from egocentric motives.
One gap in TPD is the lack of a cognitive developmental context: Dabrowski does not spell out what high developmental potential looks like at age 6 or in early adolescence. Signs of high developmental potential may be visible from time to time in school years, but full actualization often requires both life events and abstract reasoning ability. Dabrowski believed that at the upper reaches of developmental potential neither experience nor the quality of the environment is as determinative as in lower levels.
In sum, a Dabrowskian perspective requires reframing common conceptions of giftedness and development: TPD emphasizes authenticity, morality, becoming and service to others rather than material success or academic achievement.
