How Dynamisms Arise

Interesting Quotes, Vol. 17

Today’s version of Interesting Quotes comes directly from a retrieval document I created about seven years ago to better understand the connection between overexcitabilities and dynamisms.

These passages laid the foundation for how I’ve come to understand overexcitabilities (OEs) as the fuel of transformation, and the dynamisms as the evolving psychological structures they produce. The connection between the two is at the heart of Dąbrowski’s theory, but it was easy to miss this in much of the literature available when I first came to the field. Too often, OEs were isolated from their developmental implications, treated like personality traits or temperamental quirks instead of raw potential that could, under the right conditions, ignite a process of inner transformation.

Photo by Sushobhan Badhai on Unsplash

When I presented with Frank Falk in 2018, I was just beginning to feel confident naming these connections. I knew from experience that emotional overexcitability had propelled me into self-examination, imaginational OE offered refuge and renewal, and intellectual OE insisted I understand the meaning of it all. What I lacked until that work with Frank was a fully articulated theory of how those intensities evolved into the dynamisms that shaped my internal growth. These excerpts helped me find that language.

What strikes me now, rereading them years later, is how clearly the theory names what had been unfolding in me all along. Positive maladjustment arose from the intensity of my inner life—from feeling, thinking, and imagining in ways that refused to fit. I couldn’t stay aligned with the world as it was. Stepping away marked the beginning of becoming.

As Dąbrowski and Piechowski wrote, emotional OE is the root of dynamisms such as dissatisfaction with oneself, feelings of guilt and shame, responsibility, empathy, and authenticity. In my own case, I can see how these grew from the raw, overwhelming intensity of early emotional pain into deliberate forces of change—what Dąbrowski called developmental dynamisms.

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Positive maladjustment

What is the source of the phenomenon of positive maladjustment? It arises from psychic hyperexcitability particularly emotional, imaginational, and intellectual, from the nuclei of the inner psychic milieu, and from the instincts of creativity and self-perfection (Dabrowski, 1970, p. 39).

A person manifesting an enhanced psychic excitability in general, and an enhanced emotional, intellectual and imaginational excitability in particular, is endowed with a greater power of penetration into both the external and the inner world. He has a greater need to see their many dimensions and many levels, to think and reflect upon them. These forms of overexcitability are the initial condition of developing an attitude of positive maladjustment to oneself, to others, and to the surrounding world. (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 65)

The urge to reject conformity—what Dąbrowski called positive maladjustment—isn’t pathological. It originates in heightened sensitivity and awareness. When someone feels intensely (emotionally), imagines deeply (imaginationally), and reflects actively (intellectually), it becomes difficult to passively accept social norms or unexamined routines. These intensities create the initial condition for inner transformation. They are what generate inner conflict and the refusal to adjust to a world that feels misaligned with one’s deeper truths.

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Emotional, imaginational, and intellectual OE:

Emotional overexcitability is of fundamental importance in the formation and shaping of a hierarchy of values, empathy, identification, self-consciousness, autonomy, authenticity, etc.; that is to say, of the dynamisms which play a decisive role in the general and positive development of a human individual.

Imaginational overexcitability is of great significance in artistic creativity, in positive infantilism, in the capacity for retrospection and prospection, in intuitive planning and even in contemplation and ecstasy.

Intellectual overexcitability, especially in conjunction with emotional and imaginational overexcitability, gives rise to scholarly creativity, to the growth of reflection and self-control, of autonomy and authenticity, of an autonomous hierarchy of values, of the dynamism subject-object in oneself and of the third factor. (Dabrowski, 1973, p. 173)

This is the heart of development. Emotional OE leads directly to the formation of multilevel dynamisms, such as empathy, self-awareness, and autonomy. Imaginational OE fosters introspection, visioning, and transcendence. And when intellectual OE works in concert with the others, we see the emergence of dynamisms like subject–object in oneself and the third factor. It’s an integrated developmental process. Beyond intensity, overexcitabilities make possible the growth of personality.

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Developmental Potential

Autonomous and accelerated development is always associated with multiple forms of overexcitability. They can be detected in children aged 2–3. It is thus logical to assume that they constitute a major portion of the original endowment. The dynamisms should then be the derivatives of overexcitability. If this is assumed to be true, then the forms of overexcitability become the elements of the original structure of developmental potential (DP). Thus at the start of development DP can be equated with the complement of five forms of overexcitability. (Piechowski, 1975, p. 255)

The forms of overexcitability and the dynamisms are regarded as the moving forces of development: overexcitability being the original equipment, and dynamisms the propellant derivatives. If the forms of overexcitability and the dynamisms actually are the only significant forces of development, then the assessment of their strength should yield an assessment of the strength of the developmental potential. (Piechowski, 1975, p. 259)

The concept of developmental potential is introduced out of logical necessity to account for individual differences in the extent of development. This concept is not offered as an abstraction, however elegant, but is associated with observable traits—the five forms of overexcitability and their derivatives—the dynamisms—which allow one to assess its composition and strength. These traits are the key to and explanation of development through positive disintegration. (Piechowski, 1975, p. 266)

Piechowski’s 1975 monograph gave me a way to think about developmental potential not as a fixed quantity, but as an expression of the interplay between overexcitabilities and their more evolved forms (dynamisms). What we often see as “raw intensity” in a child or adult may actually be the foundation for growth—if there is sufficient internal or external support to activate it. The presence of OEs tells us something about potential; the presence of dynamisms tells us that developmental forces are active.

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Dynamisms as products of OE

In general, we may suppose that in the sequence of development dynamisms are the product of differentiation of forms of overexcitability. Certainly, such dynamisms as dissatisfaction with oneself, inferiority toward oneself, disquietude with oneself, feelings of guilt, responsibility, empathy, are primarily derivatives of emotional overexcitability. They are its varied and more evolved forms. (Piechowski, 1975, p. 292)

This quote reframed what I used to see as emotional dysfunction—feelings of guilt, shame, restlessness, self-doubt—as developmental signals. I had thought of them as symptoms, but they were dynamisms, and they had emerged from the very OE that had always been most painful to carry. This helped me reinterpret years of emotional struggle through a developmental lens.

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If we accept the hypothesis that dynamisms differentiate from forms of overexcitability, then these forms take on the role of primary factors of development. Thus the theory of positive disintegration offers the means by which one can account for developmental transformations in the level of cognitive and emotional behavior. The same means, i.e. the dosages of different forms of overexcitability, appear, at present, sufficient to account for the origin of individual variation in the patterns and levels of development. (Dabrowski & Piechowski, 1977, p. 245)

This is another vital point: the dosage of OE matters. Individual differences in development—why one person evolves a complex inner life while another doesn’t—may come down to the specific blend and intensity of OEs, and whether the person has the conditions (internal and external) to channel those excitabilities into dynamisms.

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The developmental transitions are from integration to disintegration and from unilevel structures to multilevel structures. It was stated that the feasibility and the extent of these transitions is a function of the developmental potential; its components, the three factors and the five forms of overexcitability, were identified. It would seem this is all that is needed. However, the developmental potential is defined as the original endowment necessary to reach a given level of development. This does not mean that it is sufficient. It appears as a logical necessity to postulate an organizing factor which can gradually bring order out of the chaos of the clashes and conflicts provided by the multivariate components of the original endowment. This organizing factor might be distinct from it. This certainly is a difficult problem and one which cannot be readily resolved. But the use of a concept of a ‘developmental instinct’ addresses to this problem. (Dąbrowski, 1996, p. 25)

Even if OEs and dynamisms are present, development isn’t guaranteed. Something else must help organize the chaos and move things forward. Dąbrowski called this the developmental instinct—a kind of inner compass that directs disintegration toward higher levels of functioning.

I didn’t connect with that idea right away. How do we study and measure a developmental instinct? It sounded abstract, almost mystical, and hard to reconcile with the messiness of real life. But over time, I came to recognize something like it in myself. I lived through times when everything felt fragmented or impossible, and yet something deeper kept pushing me to make meaning, to align with values, and to keep going.

I still don’t know exactly what the developmental instinct is. But I trust that there’s something in me—something organizing and propelling—that’s carried me forward, even when nothing else made sense.

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This is why I return to these quotes again and again. They remind me that none of this was random. That intensity, emotional pain, even dysfunction—these can be the seeds of profound growth, if we know what to look for and how to support it.

References

Dabrowski, K. (with Kawczak, A., & Piechowski, M. M.). (1970). Mental growth through positive disintegration. Gryf.

Dabrowski, K. (1972). Psychoneurosis is not an illness. Gryf.

Dabrowski, K. (1973). The dynamics of concepts. Gryf.

Dąbrowski, K. (1996). Multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions. Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego.

Dabrowski, K., & Piechowski, M. M. (1977). Theory of levels of emotional development: Vol. 2. From primary integration to self-actualization. Dabor Science.

Piechowski, M. M. (1975). A theoretical and empirical approach to the study of development. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 92, 231-297.