The theory of positive disintegration is still somewhat niche but has had some exposure online. A good thing too, as I’d get sick of people whose research is reading the synopsis of a Wikipedia article to start throwing around the phrase like they do with ’the Dunning-Kruger effect'.
The essential thesis of the book can be summarised thus. Many neurotic symptoms — including anxiety, depression, the sense of inferiority, withdrawing from others, overexcitability, and more — are not exclusively symptoms of mental illness, but are often a necessary element to personality development. We can see these symptoms are common in stages of growth, most of all puberty, but also at points of childhood and during menopause. Puberty is almost always coupled with a total reconstruction of a person’s personality, occurring through a rather painful process to which the person is quite sensitive. But we can also see this in for instance, the artist. The neuroticism of artist’s has been well known, and today we are obsessed with impressing modern ideas of mental health and illness onto past artists, but Dabrowski would rather say that their ‘symptoms’ are indeed necessary in their creativity, but are probably not symptoms of mental illess.
The theory is quite intuitive to most people, except those whose identity is too strongly tied to contemporary psychiatry, psychiatrists and their patients. But, the layman has always said what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
The theory in general has some interesting effects which are made more clear by the final chapter, which is where Dabrowski really develops his stance on what this means for the treatment of patients more generally, going so far as to make a new definition of mental health. He believes mental health should not be merely the average state, but must consist of a person exhibiting excellent personality development. I don’t buy this, for we do not say a person is physically unhealthy just because they are not athletic, and that we cannot make virtue the foundation of mental health.
This book is helpful for those of us who are creative and somewhat neurotic. He makes clear that these states will happen, they are necessary and unavoidable, but that ‘autotherapy’ is possible, so one can steer through this on their own. Unfortunately, proper discussion on ‘autotherapy’ is absent in this work. Even if Dabrowski believes that the person must learn how to do it alone, though I doubt there aren’t at least a few things common between all, he should state as much.
The work can be frustrating as it feels repetitive in two ways. The first is that, because certain terminology is used repeatedly and the same or similar points are often repeated, it makes the book a little more difficult to get through. Also, the work feels more like a collection of essays than one cohesive work.
This was my second reading of this work, the first being some two or three years ago. It is enjoyable, and has been personally important to me, but it does have some weaknesses. For most people who want to learn about this, I would point to more approachable and quicker article, as the idea really isn’t very complex.