THEORY OF POSITIVE DISINTEGRATION

Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration describes the creation of the unique, individual personality. "Personality is defined as a self-aware, self-chosen, self-affirmed, and self-determined unity of essential individual psychic qualities." Choice between higher and lower realms of behavior define us as human and delineate our multileveled Reality. Dabrowski proposed that neurosis is not an illness, but that it is automatic when the person becomes conscious of his own psychological development. He insists that real therapy involves self-observation through a lifelong autopsychotheraputic tracking and mapping of the inner environment. According to Dabrowski difficulty such as suffering, aloneness, self-doubt, sadness and inner conflict are symptoms constituting the psychic richness of an expanding consciousness.

He says that the capacity of the individual to develop is determined by the ability to change one's internal environment and the ability to positively influence the external environment. If mental health is seen as the development of the personality, we can say that characteristics of accelerated development include increased mental excitability, depressions, self-dissatisfaction, feelings of inferiority and guilt, anxiety, inhibitions, denial and ambivalence - are necessary growth symptoms of the transition through neurosis. The point being that without intense and painful introspection and self-reflection, we cannot realize our multidimensional and multilevel development toward an ever increasing awareness of body, mind, humanity and cosmos.

Dabrowski holds that without external and internal conflicts, with lower level realities there is no spontaneous, deliberate or desperate choice to realize a higher level of reality. The more we awaken (disembed, differentiate), the more we can use the disturbance of psychoneuroses as an opportunity to "take our life into our own hands." Thus the brain evolves through the process of disintegration and subsequent positive reintegration at higher levels. The drive of the prefrontal lobes for inner/outer mastery (executive function) amounts to the expression of a drive for moral autonomy, integration and harmony, by the upgrade of more immature-primitive structures. As this process of transmutation becomes more conscious the individual becomes a willing agent in both his breakdown and renewal…through what could be called permaculture of the soul.

The "cure" for socalled dysfunction is achieved by reaching a higher level through inner psychic transformation. By seeing dis-ease as being part of the growth cycle, we gain a sense of distance and reassurance by which we may carefully reparent and recreate ourselves via constant metamorphosis. Mindfulness and discriminating awareness of both the inner and outer milieus - propels the individual through higher levels of "neuroses," while simultaneously inhabiting ever higher levels of universal personality. Universal personality or autonomy is achieved by moving through the various roadblocks to informed choice to “make up one’s own mind about how to act.” It is generally agreed that autonomous agency (autonomy) is both the source of fundamental rights and the key to understanding what these rights are and what we must do to acknowledge them. In an ideal world autonomy (and hence each sovereign agent) is the source of moral norms. Sarah Buss points to the value of autonomy and respect as the moral fabric of society in that she says most seducers, deceivers and manipulators prevent their victims from governing themselves and from being sufficiently in touch with reality, or from relating to the manipulator as an equal, because they lack concern for the well-being and happiness of another human being. This points to the underlying predatory patriarchal practices of extractive industrial nations, and the coercive brainwashing machine needed to hold the dysfunction in place - through terrorizing and shaming the population.

Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration clearly states the importance of "acceptance of what is" as a necessary prior condition to moving beyond the quicksand of lower stages of being. The cellular embrace of "reality" whatever it is seems to be the key to moving up and onwards. Thus we see how a lived "original blessing" is the only real evolutionary stance...for the punitive, terrorizing or pedantic energetic shunts energy away from the prefrontal lobes and hyperintegration of the brain, into more primitive modes of operation. Really grokking this is the secret to overcoming the self-shaming that undermines core confidence and radiance...and our entire energy battery.

The world will torture and shame us to the degree that we have not burned clean our resistance to the flow of love and Spirit. Jung's tension of stage differential and Reich's battle for orgastic potency are the same psychophysical phenomena, in which kundalini inflated emotion pushes through the armoring of the lower energy state. The tension, battle and stress of growth is a factor of the charge of consciousness meeting resistance and creating friction, thus the labor, anger, frustration and heat of moving from the conditioned monad to a more enlightened, transparent level. When we stop bearing down on and resisting our resistance we set our Self free to simple Be...liberating the evolutionary process to Flow as IT demands of us.

http://positivedisintegration.com/ — Kazimeriez Dabrowski
The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton