The Self You Are Becoming

Developmental Choice in Dąbrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration

Kazimierz Dąbrowski was a Polish psychiatrist who spent his career studying the inner lives of people in psychological crisis. In his theory of positive disintegration, self-choice is the central drama of human development: painful, iterative, and never finished until the person who emerges from the process is fundamentally different from the one who entered it. But before you can choose yourself, you have to be able to see yourself, and the seeing Dąbrowski described goes deeper than self-awareness in the ordinary sense. It requires the discovery that what you already are is stratified, and that some of it has to go.

I have spent the past decade inside this theory—studying the primary texts, working with researchers who knew Dąbrowski’s constructs, and tracing how the theory maps onto my own developmental experience. What I want to lay out here is what developmental choice actually looks like in Dąbrowski’s framework.

Photo by Lucio Patone on Unsplash

Seeing the Levels Within

Most people, most of the time, experience themselves as more or less consistent. They have preferences, habits, and reactions. They might describe themselves as “complicated,” but the complication is lateral—different moods, different roles, different contexts. It stays on one plane.

Developmental choice requires something else entirely. It requires the lived experience of hierarchy within yourself—the recognition that some of what you are is closer to what you could become, and some of it is farther away. Dąbrowski described this as the distinction between “more myself” and “less myself,” and he meant it phenomenologically. This is an experience: the visceral sense that certain reactions, impulses, or patterns of thought belong to a version of you that you are growing beyond, while others belong to a version you are growing toward.

This vertical perception emerges through the process Dąbrowski called multilevel disintegration—the breaking apart of a previously unified psychic structure into distinguishable levels. The dynamisms that drive this process are difficult ones. Astonishment with oneself—the shock of seeing something in yourself you didn’t expect. Disquietude, dissatisfaction, feelings of inferiority toward yourself, shame, and guilt. These experiences reveal the vertical dimension of the psyche. They are, in Dąbrowski’s framework, developmentally necessary. Without them, the individual never perceives the hierarchy within, and without that perception, there is nothing to choose between.

The Three Operations of Developmental Choice

Dąbrowski identified three operations at the core of developmental choice: affirmation, negation, and choice. These are distinct, and understanding their relationship is essential.

• Affirmation is the acceptance and cultivation of what is experienced as higher—what is “more myself,” closer to the emerging personality ideal. It is the recognition that certain capacities, sensitivities, and orientations represent the direction of one’s development, and the decision to invest in them.

• Negation is the rejection of what is experienced as lower—what is “less myself,” primitive, automatic, incompatible with who one is becoming. Dąbrowski described patients who experienced disgust toward certain forms of their own thinking and behavior. That disgust is negation at work. It is a developmental evaluation, a verdict rendered by one part of the psyche about another.

• Choice is the synthetic act that emerges from the tension between affirmation and negation. It is the discriminating decision that gives development its direction. Crucially, it is always vertical—always operating along the axis of higher and lower, always discriminating between levels rather than selecting among options on the same plane. When Dąbrowski calls the third factor “a dynamism of conscious choice,” he means choice that discriminates between levels.

These three operations are carried by the dynamism Dąbrowski called the third factor. He named it this because it represents a force in human development that is autonomous—arising from the individual’s own developmental process and progressively achieving independence from both biological endowment (the first factor) and social influence (the second factor). The third factor evaluates, approves or disapproves, accepts or rejects—and it does so in relation to both the inner psychic milieu and the external environment.

What Has to Be in Place

The third factor does not appear in a ready-made form. Dąbrowski was explicit about this: it requires that several other capacities have already developed to sufficient strength. Specifically, it requires the dynamism of subject-object in oneself (the capacity to observe yourself as both subject and object simultaneously), inner psychic transformation (the active process of reworking stimuli and experiences within the psyche), and the ability to distinguish what is closer to and farther from the personality ideal.

This sequence is important. Developmental choice is available only when the psychic structure has opened up enough to reveal the vertical dimension, and when the individual has developed the observational and evaluative capacities to work within it.

In unilevel integration—where the psychic structure is organized around primitive drives and intelligence serves instrumental purposes—there is no vertical perception and therefore no developmental choice. At unilevel disintegration—where the structure has loosened but the individual cycles through ambivalences and ambitendencies without vertical resolution—there are oscillations on one plane, shifts between “this” and “that” rather than “higher” and “lower.”

Developmental choice proper begins at spontaneous multilevel disintegration, where the vertical axis opens, and the individual begins to experience the hierarchy within. Even here, the dynamisms are more revelatory than organizing. They show you the levels; they do not yet give you the capacity to choose systematically between them. At organized multilevel disintegration, the third factor becomes fully active, and choice becomes conscious, deliberate, and increasingly coordinated with the emerging personality ideal.

This developmental gradient means that what looks like “choosing yourself” at different levels of development is qualitatively different. The person who “chooses themselves” by following their impulses is doing something categorically different from the person who chooses themselves by overriding their impulses in service of a developmental vision constructed through years of inner conflict and self-observation.

The Role of Prospection

This is where Dąbrowski’s account becomes most distinctive. Developmental choice is oriented toward something that does not yet exist. The personality ideal—the standard against which one evaluates one’s actual personality structure—is an emergent structure, shaped through the very process of development, becoming more distinct as the individual advances in their personal growth. In Dynamics of Concepts, Dąbrowski (1973) wrote that the third factor “is grounded in a prospective, developmental perspective; in the conception of man as becoming, rather than a readymade being.”

This prospective orientation involves both retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is the backward look—an awareness of what one was, of what has been overcome, of the developmental distance already traveled. Prospection is the forward look—an awareness of what one is becoming, of what ought to be, of the trajectory that the hierarchy of values implies. Dąbrowski described prospection as “seeing what ‘ought to be,’” and treated it as a necessary part of inner psychic transformation.

The implications are significant. If developmental choice is oriented toward what one is becoming rather than what one already is, then the self being “chosen” is a developmental trajectory. You are choosing the self you are in the process of constituting. The “more myself” that you affirm is still emerging. The “less myself” that you negate is still active, still pulling on you. The choice happens in the space between what is and what ought to be—and that space is maintained by the tension of ongoing disintegration.

This is why Dąbrowski insisted that the multilevel understanding of values allows one to discern their direction in further development, and gives ground for an “empirically justifiable system of hypotheses concerning the shaping of their structure in further development, ‘in prospection’”—including what they “ought to be.”¹ The normative dimension emerges from the developmental process itself.

Choosing Yourself Again and Again

One of the most striking things in Dąbrowski’s work is the insistence that personality is chosen repeatedly. In Dynamics of Concepts, he describes “the repeated acts of choosing one’s personality many times until the moment of the final choice.” Each successive act of choosing narrows and deepens the field. What was once a broad range of possible selves gradually resolves into an increasingly distinct individual structure, until the central qualities become permanent—qualitatively stable, still growing, but with a core that holds.

A patient autobiography that Dąbrowski (1964) quotes in Positive Disintegration captures this vividly: “I have chosen my ‘self’ from among many ‘selfs,’ and I find that I still must constantly make this choice.” The patient goes on to describe the persistence of a “strange self” that remains strong—an ongoing pull toward patterns that are experienced as foreign to the developing personality, patterns that do not simply disappear because they have been rejected. The developmental choice is always made against active resistance from within, which is precisely why it has to be made again and again.

I find this one of the most honest things in the clinical literature. Here is someone who has done the work and chosen—and who must keep choosing, against a part of themselves that remains strong and refuses to yield. Most frameworks gloss over that ongoing struggle. Each act of choosing builds on the previous ones. The developmental trajectory accumulates weight. The individual progressively constitutes their own essence through these choices, until a point is reached where the choice is final—where the personality has achieved a coherence that makes reversal unthinkable. The person has become who they have been choosing to become.

Choice Against the Deepest Instincts

Dąbrowski pushed the logic of developmental choice to its most extreme implications. The examples he returned to most often—Father Maksymilian Kolbe voluntarily taking another prisoner’s place in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz, Janusz Korczak accompanying his pupils to the gas chamber despite having the option to escape—are cases where developmental choice overrides the instinct of self-preservation. These are the culmination of a long process of self-constitution through repeated acts of choosing, carried to the point where the personality built through those choices cannot be abandoned, even at the cost of biological survival.

Dąbrowski framed this as the “choice of one of two kinds of values”—the choice between self-preservation and self-perfection, between biological continuity and fidelity to the hierarchy of values that the individual has constructed. The activity of the third factor, he wrote, is “especially in the opposition against the most fundamental instincts in oneself and against primitive influences of the environment.”²

This is where the theory becomes most provocative. If developmental choice can override the survival instinct, then the self that has been chosen is a moral-developmental achievement that transcends its biological substrate. Dąbrowski was describing, in clinical and developmental terms, what it means for a person to have constituted themselves so thoroughly through acts of choice that their identity is no longer dependent on continued existence.

The Paradox at the Heart of the Third Factor

There is a philosophical puzzle in Dąbrowski’s account of where the third factor comes from, and he acknowledged it directly. The third factor must ultimately stem from either heredity or environment, since there are no other sources. But any strict derivation from one or both would fail to capture how it actually arises. His solution was Bergsonian: more can be found in the effects than in their causes. The third factor is emergent. It co-arises with the developmental process it organizes.

The agent of developmental choice is itself a developmental achievement. You cannot have the third factor without multilevel disintegration, and you cannot have organized multilevel disintegration without the third factor. This circularity is the phenomenological reality of development as Dąbrowski understood it. The self that chooses and the self that is chosen are the same self in different phases of its own becoming.

This is what makes Dąbrowski’s account fundamentally different from cognitive or behavioral models that treat choice as the operation of an already-constituted agent selecting among pre-defined options. In those models, the chooser is given; only the options vary. In Dąbrowski’s theory, the chooser is being constituted through the very act of choosing. Development is the process by which a self comes into being.

What This Means

The popular injunction to “choose yourself” gets the sequence backward. Developmental choice requires the disintegrative process that reveals the levels within, the capacity for self-observation that allows the distinction between “more myself” and “less myself,” and the prospective vision that orients choosing toward what one is becoming. The choice is hard-won, iterative, and never available without the suffering that makes vertical perception possible. It arrives late in the process, not at the beginning.

This also means that efforts to eliminate psychic distress—through medication, behavioral intervention, or cultural pressure to be positive—may be interrupting the very process through which developmental choice becomes possible. This was one of Dąbrowski’s most controversial claims, and one of his most important. Psychoneurosis, anxiety, depression, inner conflict—these are the conditions under which the vertical axis of the psyche becomes visible, and the work of choosing can begin.

The person in crisis who is experiencing shame about their own reactions, guilt about their own impulses, dissatisfaction with who they have been—that person is standing at the threshold of developmental choice. The question is whether the suffering will open the vertical dimension or collapse it. Whether they will find support for the difficult work of choosing who they are becoming—or be told to calm down, adjust, and accept.

Dąbrowski spent his career arguing that adjustment is a developmental dead end. The path to personality runs through the crisis, the choosing, and the willingness to keep choosing when the strange self remains strong, and the work is far from finished.

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

2. Both quotes are from The Dynamics of Concepts. Please note that I have chosen not to include citations because my audience is mostly lay people. Here are Dąbrowski’s own words on the third factor with references.