Interesting Quotes, Volume 1

From the pages of my journals to you.

Today I was supposed to be headed to Yunasa in Michigan, but my flight was canceled, leaving me with enough time to write and share the first installment of Interesting Quotes.

This one is freely available, but from now on, paid subscribers can expect a weekly post where I share quotations I think they’ll find worthwhile, along with my commentary. I can’t assure you that this post will always be on the same day of the week, but I promise to be as consistent as possible.

Bringing my writing and research process to our podcast audience is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time. For those who aren’t aware, I’m a “diarist,” which is a term I don’t love, but it’s the truth. I started writing a journal when I was 16 years old, and now I’m middle-aged and still documenting my life and thoughts.

For those who want such details, I’ve been using ruled Moleskine Cahier journals for the past nine years. My favorite pens to use with these notebooks are Pilot G-Tec-C4 and Sakura Pigma Micron 01, always in blue. Since the summer of 2018, I’ve been typing up what I write into Microsoft Word the day after or shortly after I’ve written an entry. For instance, if I’m on a trip, I don’t type what I’ve written until I’m back home. Staying close to my words has made a tremendously positive difference in my life. For one thing, I can’t hide from myself and my mistakes. It’s all there on paper to be faced and dealt with.

I’ve written millions of words in my journals throughout my life thus far, and they are not all my words. When I’m reading, I tend to copy down interesting sentences and passages for future reference.

As a qualitative researcher, I use two kinds of data analysis software to organize and analyze my personal data: QDA Miner/WordStat and MAXQDA. The quotes I’ll be sharing in these posts have all come from coding my journals in QDA Miner.

Several months ago, I decided to search my journals from 2017 to the present for quotes I’ve copied from other sources. I was astonished to discover that from August 2017 through October 2022, the Word document with coded segments was 202 pages long. This is the work I’ll be drawing from to create these posts.

For this first installment of Interesting Quotes, I will share some meaningful passages from Dr. Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s works.

As I mentioned in the first newsletter post, I’m someone who came to Dąbrowski’s theory with the belief that I was mentally ill. You can expect more from me about this topic soon, but first, let’s look at KD’s words.

Each form of overexcitability points to a higher than average sensitivity of its receptors. As a result a person endowed with different forms of overexcitability reacts with surprise, puzzlement to many things, he collides with things, persons and events, which in turn brings him astonishment and disquietude. One could say that one who manifests a given form of overexcitability, and especially one who manifests several forms of overexcitability, sees reality in a different, stronger and more multisided manner. Reality for such an individual ceases to be indifferent but affects him deeply and leaves long-lasting impressions. Enhanced excitability is thus a means for more frequent interactions and a wider range of experiencing. (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 7)

That is a classic from Psychoneurosis is Not an Illness, and it’s one of my all-time favorites about overexcitability. It never occurred to me when I was growing up that I had a different experience of reality than other people. I’ve come back to these words from KD repeatedly since first reading this book. You can see in his words how overexcitabilities can become dynamisms, which is hugely significant when it comes to living with OEs and transforming ourselves.

Here’s another one from the same book, just a few pages later:

In individuals who are richly endowed and talented the same influence leads to psychoneurotic creative processes which, although rich in their content, are described by the social milieu and the physicians as pathological. Such a label is, of course, detrimental to both the psychoneurotic individuals and the society. In this, way the path of collisions between psychoneurotics with their creative components and the environment takes shape. The path of these collisions is a hard road of liberation for creative individuals, it is a path of suffering—not always necessary and not always useful. It is a path which does not quickly lead to finding one’s own road of development because of the strong inhibitions and frequently high suggestibility of these individuals. (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 10)

“The path of these collisions is a hard road of liberation.” Yes. And it is indeed a path of suffering. We know that disintegrations are not always positive, and one of the challenges I’ve faced when working with people through the positive disintegration framework is helping them understand that we’re allowed to shed labels and identities that no longer serve us. We can do that in part by learning to trust ourselves and finding that individual “road of development.”

Dąbrowski published two books under the pen name Paul (Paweł) Cienin. The word cień means shadow in Polish, and these short books give us incredible insights into Dąbrowski’s experiences and personal beliefs in a way we don’t get from his other works. The titles are Existential Thoughts and Aphorisms (also available in Polish as Myśli i Aforyzmy Egzystencjalne) and Fragments from the Diary of a Madman.

Here’s an excerpt I appreciate from Existential Thoughts and Aphorisms:

“Kafka preferred dreams to reality. He elaborated, systematized, cultivated and controlled them. He transferred his "headquarters” to dreams. Their strength and penetration transcended reality. Yes . . . perhaps it is the problem of the future to develop dreams and similar states and to create from them the main dimensions of reality.” (Cienin, 1972, pp. 42-43)

I’ve mentioned at least once on the podcast that the things Dąbrowski said about Franz Kafka are very familiar to me as someone with strong imaginational OE.

From Mental Growth through Positive Disintegration, this is the first excerpt I remember reading about Kafka that felt like it stopped my heart with its familiarity:

Kafka organized for himself a "pathological” world of higher levels of reality by transferring his interests to a systematically organized world of dreams. From this dream world he derived all his creative energy. This world was so systematically organized and unified that it became the main field of his experience and activity. This permitted him to descend, in a more or less organized manner, to the realities of everyday life, which were for him a somewhat peripheral aspect of his own life. If the everyday realities became too difficult to cope with he could always later escape to his world of dreams. (Dabrowski, 1970, p. 56)

Unfortunately, in my case, the contents of my dream world were not positive. It took me many years to be able to rescript the imagery in my mind and learn to take control of the imaginal process that came so naturally. But even though there are differences between my experience and Kafka’s, reading these words in Dąbrowski helped me realize that I wasn’t alone in this way of being, and that was an incredible discovery to make in adulthood.

Here’s another excerpt about Kafka, this time from PINAI again:

Kafka’s world was composed of three realms: dreams, creativity, and everyday reality with which he felt the least in common and which often repulsed him. He felt more at home in other levels of reality. The world of his dreams became his real world. Contrary to the usually experienced fragmentation, unreality, and discontinuity of dreams Kafka’s dream world had a distinct continuity and a distinct relationship to the realities of human existence. The transposition of his main current of activity to the dream world was for Kafka also a means of handling the difficulties of everyday life. (Dabrowski, 1972, pp. 182-183)

“The world of his dreams became his real world.” I know it’s hard for people to understand who don’t possess this type of mental process, but for those of us with powerful imaginations, it’s possible to have a life in the mind that is as real, or even more real, than our everyday realities. We can even learn to use that mental space to “handle the difficulties of everyday life.” You can expect me to say much more about this particular phenomenon in these newsletter posts.

Such elaborated world of imagination in spite of being removed from ordinary reality has its own sense, its own limits, its own organization, its own laws independent to a large extent from the laws of the ordinary reality. Such a world gives an experiential satisfaction to those who dwell in it. (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 187)

There’s a new paper in Roeper Review about maladaptive daydreaming and overexcitability, and I was disappointed to see that the authors didn’t cite Dąbrowski’s work. As you can see from the abstract, they found that maladaptive daydreaming was positively associated with imaginational OE and negatively associated with sensual OE. This finding affirms what Dąbrowski first stated as far back as 1938 when he said, “Those with overexcitable imagination present a broadening of the sphere of imagination to the detriment of sensory experience” (p. 16).

People with strong imaginational OE often aren’t as grounded in tangible reality through the senses, which can be seen in this excerpt from another one of his books, The Dynamics of Concepts:

As we see, in some men, an extraordinary strength of stimuli and transformers coming from imagination and fantasy allows a synthetic and incisive interpretation of many problems of life, while sensory stimuli and sensory experiences play in their lives a secondary, or even less than secondary role. (Dabrowski, 1973, p. 5)

It’s great to see modern research finally catching up with what KD knew many decades ago, and the work on so-called maladaptive daydreaming has important implications. I can say from my own experience that developing a mindfulness practice has helped me become more present and grounded. But, unfortunately, the OE research is often disconnected from Dąbrowski’s own writing, which is so deep and meaningful for those of us who live with overexcitability. I hope that the work Emma and I have started with the Positive Disintegration Pod, and now this newsletter, will somehow make a dent in the issue.

With that, I will wrap up this first edition of Interesting Quotes. I can tell that writing these posts will take me down unexpected paths, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they take me. I hope this first attempt was enjoyable, and I will prepare another one to be released next week while I’m at camp. Thank you for reading!

References

Cienin, P. (1972). Existential thoughts and aphorisms. Gryf Publications.

Dąbrowski, K. (1938/2019). Types of increased psychic excitability (Michael M. Piechowski, Trans.). Advanced Development, 17, 1-26. (Original work published 1938)

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

Dabrowski, K. (1972). Psychoneurosis is not an illness: Neuroses and psychoneuroses from the perspective of positive disintegration. Gryf Publications.

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

(Note that some of KD’s English books were published without the ą, which is why I have used ‘a’ instead of ‘ą’ where appropriate. )