Interesting Quotes, Vol. 16
Inner Growth and Transformation in the Life of Eleanor Roosevelt
In March, the Friday cohort of the Positive Disintegration Study Group discussed Dr. Michael M. Piechowski’s (1990) paper Inner Growth and Transformation in the Life of Eleanor Roosevelt. The group will be renamed and relaunched in June as the Positive Disintegration Community, and we’ll have more details available soon.
I originally intended to create posts sharing Michael’s work by decade during the winter. The first was Unearthing the Forgotten Gems about his work in the 1980s. The one I started working on about his work in the 1990s was stalled for months. But reading Michael’s ER paper for the group in March helped me see that I’d rather write about the papers using the Interesting Quotes format.
The paper I’m sharing quotes from today was published in Volume 2 of Advanced Development Journal in 1990 and brought the theory and dynamisms to life through a discussion of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and work. Click here to download a PDF.
From Michael:
“The objective of this study is to show the emotional and intellectual traits that Eleanor Roosevelt cultivated in developing her discipline of inner life. Her emotional development in adulthood can be seen in terms similar to those of a person following a path of spiritual perfection. The main focus here is on identifying the specific methods she applied toward her inner transformation.” (p. 37)
People often ask me about the process of positive disintegration and how to move through it effectively. Reading about real-life exemplars of higher-level development is inspiring and offers us guidelines for doing inner work on ourselves.
Michael described some of ER’s characteristics, some from childhood:
Physical vigor
Emotional awareness
Sensitivity & responsiveness
Capacity for intense feelings
Vivid imagination
Intellect full of curiosity and love of learning
Great capacity for sustained concentration
“Intense life of feeling in which great personal vulnerability and compassion for others were combined with strong will and self-discipline in the service of her ideal.” (p. 38)
Michael’s case studies of exemplars give us insights into what multilevel development looks like in real lives.
“As William James explained, a person of moral vigor responds to a moral dilemma with, “What must I do about it?” while a common person rests content with asking herself only, “What shall I think about it?” (p. 38)
Michael discussed some of the personal issues ER struggled with, including her desire to gain mastery over fear:
“Finding and attacking points of emotional resistance in herself was Eleanor Roosevelt’s struggle for self-mastery” (p. 40). He said ER stressed that facing fear is the only way to overcome it.
Without Michael’s case study work, we would have few examples of how the processes of positive disintegration actually play out. People are often eager to talk about the theory and speculate about it without “walking it through case material,” as he would say.
In the section “The Courage to Know Oneself,” Michael wrote about ER’s inner work. In the following paragraph, Michael is describing dynamisms, including the third factor:
“Honest self-education leads logically to some conscious decisions in regard to what faults and deficiencies are to be eliminated and what positive traits are to be developed. The fruit of this labor is inner autonomy. To forge one’s inner autonomy, one much follow the values, standards, and ideals one is professing. These values imply choices on which it might not be easy to act because old habits and propensities stand in the way.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 42)
Perhaps you recognize this type of inner work from your own experiences.
From ER’s book You Learn By Living, we can see what he’s talking about above in her words:
“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” (Roosevelt, 1960, p. xii)
When Emma and I say on the podcast that living your values means “walking your talk,” this is what we mean. It’s not enough to think about who you want to be or to talk about it—your values show up in your choices and actions.
Throughout Michael’s paper, the dynamisms are brought to life. Next, he tells us what inner psychic transformation means and how it can be identified in ER’s words:
“Systematic effort to overcome one’s shortcoming’s builds on an inward vigilance. She practices this process of self-correction, a condition of a lasting inner psychic transformation, all her life: “We should look inward at ourselves to recognize our deficiencies, then do our very best to correct them.” (Roosevelt & Brough, 1977, p. 262). In this she included “the faults that you see in yourself but that no one else knows exist.” (Roosevelt, 1960, p. 72). Self-scrutiny and self-correction of this nature characterize those who strive for spiritual perfection.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 43)
If you haven’t read ER’s book, You Learn By Living, I highly recommend it. Personally, one of the things that surprised me was learning that she had a “dream world” during childhood.
Something that struck me when I first read this paper was the discussion of overcoming possessiveness. This is a theme in Michael’s work and something he mentioned in his other papers and chapters.
The following paragraph is a beautiful description of nonpossessive love:
“Finding joy in the very presence and in the individual fulfillment of the loved one makes for a purer form of love than when the joy is contingent upon what we get from that person. Eleanor Roosevelt's letters are replete with this kind of altruism in love (Lash, 1982, 1984). It means loving and having complete respect for the individuality of the other. It means loving not out of one's deficiencies in the hope that the other will provide what we lack but, rather, out of the fullness of one's heart. Love motivated by deficiency is hungry, demanding, and not growthful because in the end it can never be satisfied (Maslow, 1970) and because it seeks emotional security in the other rather than within oneself. Likewise, one must learn "to accept what other people are unable to give you. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it" (Roosevelt, 1960, p. 67). True love is nonpossessive.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 44)
The next section of the paper is called “Methods of Coping with Inner Conflict and Emotional Pain,” and after that, “Self-Discpline.”
This paper may be helpful if you are experiencing disintegration and searching for methods to cope.
Here’s a quote from ER about facing her fears that I find very relatable:
“Painfully, step by step, I learned to stare down each of my fears, conquer it, attain the hard-earned courage to go on to the next. Only then was I really free.
Of all the knowledge that we acquire in life this is the most difficult. But it is also the most rewarding. With each victory, no matter how great the cost or how agonizing at the time, there comes increased confidence and strength to help meet the next fear.” Roosevelt, 1960, p. 25)
Theoretical Analysis
Later in the paper, Michael brings together Dabrowski’s theory and Maslow’s traits of self-actualization. Two previous studies (from 1978 and 1982) informed his view that there is “an exact correspondence between the structure of self-actualization and Level IV in Dabrowski’s theory.”
Reading the two previous studies makes clear the connection between S-A and organized multilevel development from the theory of positive disintegration. There’s plenty for future posts in this area.
We’ve talked with Michael on the podcast about rethinking the levels as types of development, and this is a great paragraph that brings to light how this looks in practice:
“Dabrowski’s five developmental levels can be viewed as a typology of individual development. The main criteria for distinguishing them are: whether individuals are oriented primarily externally or internally, whether they accept without question the values dictated by society or develop their own values from experience and individual judgment; whether they have moral concerns and, if they exist, the nature of the concerns; the extent of their empathy toward others; and whether their sense of responsibility involves only external expectations and obligations or whether it is existential as well, guided by a deeper search for the meaning of life and the direction of their inner development.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 50)
Unilevel development, or Levels I and II, are the externally oriented levels in the theory of positive disintegration. Multilevel development begins with Level III and “describes the development of inner seeking, questioning, and awareness of one’s moral responsibility” (p. 50).
Next, Michael discusses self-actualization and Level IV based on another study by one of his students:
“To establish a convincing basis on which to judge an individual to be self-actualizing does not automatically provide evidence that the criteria for Level IV are also met. Our knowledge is yet far from the point at which this could be guaranteed in every case. Brennan’s (Brennan & Piechowski, 1991)1 study of three self-actualizing individuals, however, shows that the reverse is likely to be true—that meeting the criteria for Level IV would appear to assure self-actualization. The most central and the most distinctive characteristics of Level IV for which evidence exists in the material presented in this article are: inner psychic transformation, subject-object in oneself, autopsychotherapy, third factor (a dynamism of growthful decision-making), and personality ideal.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 50)
When I first came to the theory and was exploring the literature, it surprised me that there haven’t been more case studies done in recent decades because this is such a beautiful way to bring the theory to life.
“Eleanor Roosevelt often expressed herself in terms of growth: “along the line of development,” “we shape ourselves,” “inner adjustments,” “to progress inwardly,” “personal development,” meeting life’s emotional tests so that one can “grow beyond this point,” “human nature struggling toward an ideal.” Her terminology is that of a seeker engaged in inner psychic transformation, and this is what makes it so consonant with Dabrowski’s conception of emotional development as the inner growth of the individual.” (Piechowski, 1990, p. 50)
This paper is a must-read for anyone who wonders about the dynamisms. Whenever people ask me where they can learn more about the dynamisms, I point them toward Michael’s papers about the multilevel exemplars.
I recorded an episode last week for a podcast called Be Mythical, and I stumbled a little while talking about the dynamisms because the terms can sound daunting when first introduced. The way Michael makes them clear in this paper is beautiful:
“The proper consequence of an inwardly made decision is an actual change in one’s character. Dabrowski called this process “inner psychic transformation.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s reference to inner readjustments as private revolutions is one instance of this process. Other, stronger instances are her statements about learning to let go of those we love and, even more so, about being able to let others fulfill the needs of those we love that we ourselves are incapable of fulfilling. The ability to transcend inner desolation powerfully illustrates the process of inner psychic transformation.” (p. 51)
He also described ER’s process of autopsychotherapy and the time she spent contemplating the figure “Peace of God” (aka “Grief”). Here’s a quote from Eleanor herself that I keep in mind whenever I’m doing something that feels impossible:
“The encouraging thing is that every time you must meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence… You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” (Roosevelt, 1960, pp. 29 and 30, emphasis in the original).
You may have heard from others in the TPD community that Dabrowski and Michael disagreed on the issue of self-actualization and Level IV, and that’s true. Michael discussed it in his 2008 chapter.
The research speaks for itself. I recommend that anyone who’s interested read the works mentioned in this post and draw their own conclusions.
In the original article, the citation is 1987 because it wasn’t published yet. I’ve changed it to the correct year when their article came out and added a link for your convenience.