For psychologist and psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski, personality is not a given – it must be consciously created and developed by the individual. In his second English-language book, Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration, first published in 1967, Dr. Dabrowski presents a comprehensive treatment of personality that is still relevant, perhaps more so today than when it was first written. Here Dabrowski describes personality’s individual and universal characteristics, the methods involved in shaping it, and case studies of famous personalities (including Augustine and Michelangelo) demonstrating the empirical and normative nature of personality development.Included in this edition are the original introduction, written by former APA president O. Hobart Mowrer, an appendix detailing a study on gifted children and outstanding abilities conducted by Dr. Dabrowski, as well as previously unpublished biographical pieces analyzing the personalities of Beethoven, Kierkegaard, and Unamuno.Grounded in Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, Personality-Shaping introduces the concepts at the heart of the theory and at the heart of human potential, creativity, social service, inner conflict, mental illness, and personal growth. Dabrowski’s all-embracing perspective is at once a fresh alternative to the one-dimensional theories and trends pervasive in the field of psychology, and a full statement in its own right of all those aspects of human nature too often marginalized, ignored, or denied – a revolutionary and heartfelt product of Dr. Dabrowski’s incisive observations and all-embracing vision.

Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Dabrowski, Kazimierz

Psychology & Counseling

Red Pill Press

Positive Disintegration

Kazimierz Dabrowski refers to his view of personality development as the theory of positive disintegration. He defines disintegration as disharmony within the individual and in his adaptation to the external environment. Anxiety, psychoneurosis, and psychosis are symptoms of disintegration. In general, disintegration refers to involution, psychopathology, and retrogression to a lower level of psychic functioning. Integration is the opposite: evolution, psychic health, and adequate adaptation, both within the self and to the environment. Dabrowski postulates a developmental instinct--that is, a tendency of man to evolve from lower to higher levels of personality. He regards personality as primarily developing through dissatisfaction with, and fragmentation of, the existing psychic structure--a period of disintegration--and finally a secondary integration at a higher level. Dabrowski feels that no growth takes place without previous disintegration. He regards symptoms of anxiety, psychoneurosis, and even some symptoms of psychosis as the signs of the disintegration stage of this evolution, and therefore not always pathological.

Mental Health

Maurice Bassett

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