The way you clarify the distinctiveness of the idea and the process are very helpful and will help safeguard and potentiate the integrity of autopsychotherapy as it permeates the cultural milieu (as I hope it does). In my own life this process has unfolded in rolling waves.
Richard, thank you for this. I love the image of the process unfolding in rolling waves. The work returns, deepens, and returns again with a different texture. The cultural milieu point is important, too. The integrity of the concept depends on people who've actually lived it speaking about it accurately.
This paragraph encapsulates an essential element of what has drawn me to Dąbrowski's work:
"This is also why autopsychotherapy is incompatible with frameworks that treat all inner experience as equally valid, or that locate “wisdom” definitively in the person being served. Dąbrowski’s autopsychotherapy is hierarchical work. It distinguishes. It evaluates. It chooses. It rejects what is lower in the self in favor of what is higher. The work cannot proceed without that hierarchy, and the hierarchy emerges from within the developmental process itself, generated by the inner movement of the person doing the work."
I realize it's an element of a complex article that itself is an element of a complex framework for understanding what it means to be human and how we might choose to proceed in this world, given that understanding. Yet, I think it captures the layered and mutable character of the autopsychotherapy process. The process is a framework for approaching the iterations of self, rather than a rigid and specific step-by-step recipe. How we build on the framework is up to us, individually. It has to be because we are similar in functionality as hman beings (thus the framework) but unique in how we each execute that functionality.
We humans are entrenched in complexity and walking difficult paths at times in our lives. We want the "easy" road, yet that never really works out, does it? Agamemnon took the short and fast road home from the Trojan Wars, the easy route (about three weeks to sail directly back to Mycenae). And the fate of him and his House of Atreus became fodder of some of the great Greek Tragedies. He wasn't ready yet to come home. He had lower self (ego)... but not had yet fully developed his higher self.
Odysseus, on the other hand, was equally immature (in the years just after leaving Troy, he was a highly clever but arrogant punk with a bad attitude!). He too would have taken the fast road home if he could have. But it took him ten years and many struggles to get back to Ithaka. Yet when he did, he was ready to meet the serious challenges he found awaiting him. And he prevailed and lived long and well.
Or, consider Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It took a thousand pages to get a very reluctant Hobbit to bring the Ring to its destruction in Mount Doom. Wouldn't it have been easier to have had Gandalf conjure an eagle or dragon to just fly him there and drop the ring from high above? Well, that would have made for a very short story and not a very interesting one at that.
There are modern equivalents in our world that echo these stories. they are all around us.
All this is a long way to illustrate that Dąbrowski offers a way to navigate the unavoidable complexity. For me, at least, his work is densely layered and in a language that can be quite unfamiliar; in part I'm learning, because he was describing old human process with a new language and set of lenses. I am profoundly grateful to you, Chris, for your work on this "journey" to bear his work forward and help make it accessible to contemporary folk. We need this, in part because it's precisely what is needed in these times.
I've been learning about the theory for a few years now. I'm just beginning to grasp some of its components and still have so much to learn about it. I wouldn't want it any other way. Thank you for coming alongside us.
Thank you so much for this, Eric. The framework versus recipe distinction is essential, and your Odysseus example is the right illustration. Agamemnon took the fast road and arrived as the same person who had left. Odysseus took the long road and arrived as someone who had become capable of meeting what was waiting. The framework points the direction, and the work develops the capacity.
As a therapist reading this, I'm recognizing processes that have occurred within myself developmentally that I needed in order to help my adolescents trauma patients. Thanks for writing on this.
Thank you for writing this - I found this perspective on autopsychotherapy incredibly thought-provoking.
I knew Dąbrowski mostly through positive disintegration, but I hadn’t really encountered the autopsychotherapy dimension before.
What especially caught my attention was Dąbrowski locating autopsychotherapy specifically around the transition between levels III and IV.
It made me wonder how you personally recognize when this phase has become more integrated. Does autopsychotherapy eventually stabilize into a different mode of functioning, or do you see it as something that continues throughout development in different forms?
Thank you for engaging with this piece so thoughtfully, Ewelina.
On the structural part, I’d say it continues rather than stabilizing into something else. The dynamisms keep operating. What changes are the texture of experience and speed of the process. Once subject-object in oneself, the third factor, and inner psychic transformation are organized, they get faster, quieter, and reach into places they hadn’t before. I have found that inner work that used to take days starts taking hours, then minutes, then even a single sentence on the page (for those of us who write as autopsychotherapy).
The personal recognition piece is harder because integration here arrives in transformation rather than completion. What I notice instead is the same capacity doing different developmental work. In 2018, the watching could intensify the hurt; by 2019, the watching could make the hurt workable. Same watching, but different function. The marker I trust is astonishment, in the form of catching myself doing something I couldn’t have done a few years earlier and being truly surprised.
One thing worth being clear about is that the difficulty itself persists. The capacity to work with it changes.
„Same watching, but different function” feels incredibly important. I think that captures something many developmental frameworks struggle to describe clearly.
I was (still am?) extremely lucky to have the possibility to stay with the process long enough to integrate it - even if at first I didn’t fully understand what to do with this new way of seeing.😅
Thank you again for such a thoughtful response. I’m genuinely very curious what observing this process will look like further down the line.
Chris, thank you for this clear and detailed introduction. I resonate with this mapping of the process that allows me to reach through what might appear to be purely difficulties and obstacles towards a more authentic and connected way of being — in my own small and sometimes life-changing ways.
Recently I have noticed how I can sometimes reach forward in a moment with a simple and swift internal reminder, "I could have peace instead of this." And it works - just like that! However, this is rooted in hard engagement and struggle through 'stuff' at an earlier time.
Davina, thank you for sharing this with me. Your second paragraph hit me because it’s so similar to the relationship I tried to describe in the follow-up piece, where the Prayer of Saint Francis arrived during a conflict before I had to summon it. The capacity to respond that quickly is downstream of years of slow inner work. From the outside, it can look like the moment itself was easy, but it’s not. The earlier work is what made it possible.
I'll have multiple selves engage in discourses with each other to produce emergent discourses not subordinate to hegemonic constructs of selves I was supposed to internalize.
Autopsychotherapy helped me deconstruct from hegemonic constructs of selves that I was situated into; I constructed a hegemonic self due to the hegemonic environment and it's relational assymetries that induced this self.
Philosophically, there really is no self in some pre-linguistic reality. It's a contingent sociocultural discursively constructed modality situated in a relational field.
What you're saying is reminding me of my first major disintegrations, when the false self I'd constructed to survive fell apart. At the time, I hadn't yet seen it at the broader, systemic level you're naming. The piece describes autopsychotherapy as the work of distinguishing what's closer to who you're becoming from what lies further away. The constructed selves you're describing fit into that distinction, as they're one form the further away material can take when self-formation happens under environmental pressure. I think the personal recognition usually arrives first, and the systemic reading takes longer.
It's so freeing because autopsychotherapy helps me understand how there is no neutral self but that this self is an emergent biocultural psychic phenomenonological state derived from the relational field we are conditioned into.
Yes, it really is so freeing. The conditioned self is where we start. What Dąbrowski called personality can be built through inner work. Both are constructed, and the difference is whether the construction was imposed or chosen.
I think what's so freeing is how the self is discursively constructed, by which this self rooted in this discursive relational field. I can see "myself" as a discursive construct rooted in a contingent sociocultural matrix that we materially construct to reify the self. The material matrix becomes a reified extension of the self we discursively construct.
Yes. And what the theoretical framing makes possible is the daily work of authoring. I have found that the recognition becomes useful when it shows up in my choices: what to refuse, what to develop, and what version of myself to show up as.
You're recognizing your agentic capacity to disrupt this hegemonic relational field that is the context of the "self".
Dabrowski seemed to understand that this self didn't need to something we are conditioned into but that can disrupt the relational field that induces hegemonic constructs of self. We can actually resist the culture that conditions us into selves of subordination.
I'd like to know what you've seen. The reason I wrote the post is that I keep encountering this, and it troubles me. If you've watched something similar happen, your experience would be useful to hear.
The way you clarify the distinctiveness of the idea and the process are very helpful and will help safeguard and potentiate the integrity of autopsychotherapy as it permeates the cultural milieu (as I hope it does). In my own life this process has unfolded in rolling waves.
Richard, thank you for this. I love the image of the process unfolding in rolling waves. The work returns, deepens, and returns again with a different texture. The cultural milieu point is important, too. The integrity of the concept depends on people who've actually lived it speaking about it accurately.
So my talking to myself, engaging in complex analysis about myself is actually normal. Wow, so healing
Yes! Thank you for sharing this. 🙏
This paragraph encapsulates an essential element of what has drawn me to Dąbrowski's work:
"This is also why autopsychotherapy is incompatible with frameworks that treat all inner experience as equally valid, or that locate “wisdom” definitively in the person being served. Dąbrowski’s autopsychotherapy is hierarchical work. It distinguishes. It evaluates. It chooses. It rejects what is lower in the self in favor of what is higher. The work cannot proceed without that hierarchy, and the hierarchy emerges from within the developmental process itself, generated by the inner movement of the person doing the work."
I realize it's an element of a complex article that itself is an element of a complex framework for understanding what it means to be human and how we might choose to proceed in this world, given that understanding. Yet, I think it captures the layered and mutable character of the autopsychotherapy process. The process is a framework for approaching the iterations of self, rather than a rigid and specific step-by-step recipe. How we build on the framework is up to us, individually. It has to be because we are similar in functionality as hman beings (thus the framework) but unique in how we each execute that functionality.
We humans are entrenched in complexity and walking difficult paths at times in our lives. We want the "easy" road, yet that never really works out, does it? Agamemnon took the short and fast road home from the Trojan Wars, the easy route (about three weeks to sail directly back to Mycenae). And the fate of him and his House of Atreus became fodder of some of the great Greek Tragedies. He wasn't ready yet to come home. He had lower self (ego)... but not had yet fully developed his higher self.
Odysseus, on the other hand, was equally immature (in the years just after leaving Troy, he was a highly clever but arrogant punk with a bad attitude!). He too would have taken the fast road home if he could have. But it took him ten years and many struggles to get back to Ithaka. Yet when he did, he was ready to meet the serious challenges he found awaiting him. And he prevailed and lived long and well.
Or, consider Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It took a thousand pages to get a very reluctant Hobbit to bring the Ring to its destruction in Mount Doom. Wouldn't it have been easier to have had Gandalf conjure an eagle or dragon to just fly him there and drop the ring from high above? Well, that would have made for a very short story and not a very interesting one at that.
There are modern equivalents in our world that echo these stories. they are all around us.
All this is a long way to illustrate that Dąbrowski offers a way to navigate the unavoidable complexity. For me, at least, his work is densely layered and in a language that can be quite unfamiliar; in part I'm learning, because he was describing old human process with a new language and set of lenses. I am profoundly grateful to you, Chris, for your work on this "journey" to bear his work forward and help make it accessible to contemporary folk. We need this, in part because it's precisely what is needed in these times.
I've been learning about the theory for a few years now. I'm just beginning to grasp some of its components and still have so much to learn about it. I wouldn't want it any other way. Thank you for coming alongside us.
Thank you so much for this, Eric. The framework versus recipe distinction is essential, and your Odysseus example is the right illustration. Agamemnon took the fast road and arrived as the same person who had left. Odysseus took the long road and arrived as someone who had become capable of meeting what was waiting. The framework points the direction, and the work develops the capacity.
As a therapist reading this, I'm recognizing processes that have occurred within myself developmentally that I needed in order to help my adolescents trauma patients. Thanks for writing on this.
Thank you, Sarah. Yes, therapists who’ve done their own developmental work bring something to the encounter that the work itself requires. 🙏
Thank you for writing this - I found this perspective on autopsychotherapy incredibly thought-provoking.
I knew Dąbrowski mostly through positive disintegration, but I hadn’t really encountered the autopsychotherapy dimension before.
What especially caught my attention was Dąbrowski locating autopsychotherapy specifically around the transition between levels III and IV.
It made me wonder how you personally recognize when this phase has become more integrated. Does autopsychotherapy eventually stabilize into a different mode of functioning, or do you see it as something that continues throughout development in different forms?
Thank you for engaging with this piece so thoughtfully, Ewelina.
On the structural part, I’d say it continues rather than stabilizing into something else. The dynamisms keep operating. What changes are the texture of experience and speed of the process. Once subject-object in oneself, the third factor, and inner psychic transformation are organized, they get faster, quieter, and reach into places they hadn’t before. I have found that inner work that used to take days starts taking hours, then minutes, then even a single sentence on the page (for those of us who write as autopsychotherapy).
The personal recognition piece is harder because integration here arrives in transformation rather than completion. What I notice instead is the same capacity doing different developmental work. In 2018, the watching could intensify the hurt; by 2019, the watching could make the hurt workable. Same watching, but different function. The marker I trust is astonishment, in the form of catching myself doing something I couldn’t have done a few years earlier and being truly surprised.
One thing worth being clear about is that the difficulty itself persists. The capacity to work with it changes.
„Same watching, but different function” feels incredibly important. I think that captures something many developmental frameworks struggle to describe clearly.
I was (still am?) extremely lucky to have the possibility to stay with the process long enough to integrate it - even if at first I didn’t fully understand what to do with this new way of seeing.😅
Thank you again for such a thoughtful response. I’m genuinely very curious what observing this process will look like further down the line.
Chris, thank you for this clear and detailed introduction. I resonate with this mapping of the process that allows me to reach through what might appear to be purely difficulties and obstacles towards a more authentic and connected way of being — in my own small and sometimes life-changing ways.
Recently I have noticed how I can sometimes reach forward in a moment with a simple and swift internal reminder, "I could have peace instead of this." And it works - just like that! However, this is rooted in hard engagement and struggle through 'stuff' at an earlier time.
Davina, thank you for sharing this with me. Your second paragraph hit me because it’s so similar to the relationship I tried to describe in the follow-up piece, where the Prayer of Saint Francis arrived during a conflict before I had to summon it. The capacity to respond that quickly is downstream of years of slow inner work. From the outside, it can look like the moment itself was easy, but it’s not. The earlier work is what made it possible.
Thank you Chris. Yes, that is my understanding. I will read that forthwith!
I'll have multiple selves engage in discourses with each other to produce emergent discourses not subordinate to hegemonic constructs of selves I was supposed to internalize.
Autopsychotherapy helped me deconstruct from hegemonic constructs of selves that I was situated into; I constructed a hegemonic self due to the hegemonic environment and it's relational assymetries that induced this self.
Philosophically, there really is no self in some pre-linguistic reality. It's a contingent sociocultural discursively constructed modality situated in a relational field.
What you're saying is reminding me of my first major disintegrations, when the false self I'd constructed to survive fell apart. At the time, I hadn't yet seen it at the broader, systemic level you're naming. The piece describes autopsychotherapy as the work of distinguishing what's closer to who you're becoming from what lies further away. The constructed selves you're describing fit into that distinction, as they're one form the further away material can take when self-formation happens under environmental pressure. I think the personal recognition usually arrives first, and the systemic reading takes longer.
It's so freeing because autopsychotherapy helps me understand how there is no neutral self but that this self is an emergent biocultural psychic phenomenonological state derived from the relational field we are conditioned into.
Yes, it really is so freeing. The conditioned self is where we start. What Dąbrowski called personality can be built through inner work. Both are constructed, and the difference is whether the construction was imposed or chosen.
I think what's so freeing is how the self is discursively constructed, by which this self rooted in this discursive relational field. I can see "myself" as a discursive construct rooted in a contingent sociocultural matrix that we materially construct to reify the self. The material matrix becomes a reified extension of the self we discursively construct.
Yes. And what the theoretical framing makes possible is the daily work of authoring. I have found that the recognition becomes useful when it shows up in my choices: what to refuse, what to develop, and what version of myself to show up as.
You're recognizing your agentic capacity to disrupt this hegemonic relational field that is the context of the "self".
Dabrowski seemed to understand that this self didn't need to something we are conditioned into but that can disrupt the relational field that induces hegemonic constructs of self. We can actually resist the culture that conditions us into selves of subordination.
1. Have an idea
2. Add some technical words to distinguish it from similar ideas
3. Dress it all up into a package
4. Seek financial support
Gee, I’ve seen this before.
I'd like to know what you've seen. The reason I wrote the post is that I keep encountering this, and it troubles me. If you've watched something similar happen, your experience would be useful to hear.