Be Greeted Psychoneurotics: Dabrowski and the Symptoms of Expanding Consciousness

“Suffering, aloneness, self-doubt, sadness, inner conflict; these are our feelings that we have not learned to live with, that we have failed to appreciate, that we reject as destructive and completely negative, but in fact they are symptoms of an expanding consciousness. Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski has spent 45 years piecing together the complete picture of the growth of the human psyche from primitive integration at birth; the person with potential for development will experience growth as a loosening of the stable psychic structure accompanied by symptoms of psychoneuroses. Reality becomes multileveled, the choices between higher and lower realms of behavior occupy our thought and mark us as human. Dabrowski called this process positive disintegration, he declares that psychoneurosis is not an illness and he insists that development does not come through psychotherapy but that psychotherapy is automatic when the person is conscious of his development.
“To Dabrowski, real therapy is autopsychotherapy; it is the self being aware of the self through a long inner investigation; a mapping of the inner environment. There are no techniques to eliminate symptoms because the symptoms constitute the very psychic richness from which grow an increasing awareness of body, mind, humanity and cosmos. Dabrowski gives birth to that process if he can.
“Without intense and painful introspection and reflection, development is unlikely. Psychoneurotic symptoms should be embraced and transformed into anxieties about human problems of an ever higher order. If psychoneuroses continue to be classified as mental illness, then perhaps it is a sickness better than health.
“‘Without passing through very difficult experiences and even something like psychoneurosis and neurosis we cannot understand human beings and we cannot realize our multidimensional and multilevel development toward higher and higher levels.’ Dabrowski.”

 

14 thoughts on “Be Greeted Psychoneurotics: Dabrowski and the Symptoms of Expanding Consciousness”

  1. Here’s the poem by Dabrowski:
    BE GREETED, PSYCHONEUROTICS!!!
    For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world,
    uncertainty among the world’s certainties.
    For you often feel others as you feel yourselves.
    For you feel the anxiety of the world, and
    its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance.
    For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world,
    for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations.
    for your fear of the absurdity of existence.
    For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them.
    For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and
    for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things,
    for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism,
    for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends,
    for your creativity and ecstasy,
    for your maladjustment to that “which is” and
    adjustment to that which “ought to be”,
    for your great but unutilized abilities.
    For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness
    which never allows the appreciation of the greatness
    of those who will come after you.
    For your being treated instead of treating others,
    for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force;
    for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you.
    For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways.
    BE GREETED!

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  2. Hey, thanks for the political update, I really had no idea. Anyway what is interesting me is the model of having too much energy on the head, since my experience is leading me that way. The condition pointed out in the document really exists in TCM. I happened to read about the brain energetic model in “Age of autism”, but I don’t know if the scientists who porposed that are scientologists too. The brain energetics evolution at expenses of gut seems to have received some validation: even the chinese insight of being a prenatal disorder is being considered by scientists. So the area that the shaman manipulates in the kid’s body at “The Horse Boy ” documentary is related with bladder meridians –bladder is the yang organ for kidney, being this intimately related with brain (brain is part of the kidney in the chinese model) …

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    • as a general response (since I don’t know enough of the “facts” and I’m not necessarily interested enough to research them at this time), it would be a mistake to think that, because I am positing the autistic way of perceiving as a solution or balancing element to a collective pathology, I consider “autism” per se as an higher or more evolved state. On the contrary, if the autistic way of perceiving were a fully balanced one then it wouldn’t be as effective a means of correcting the NT imbalance. If a tub of water is too hot, you don’t add warm water to cool it down, you add cold.
      Ves loque digo?

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    • Well, Judas, there’s a reason why you didn’t know about that background and that’s ’cause people who challenge those organizations tend to get targeted by harassment and intimidation campaigns. That’s a whole ‘nother story that I hope will make it into J’s book. In the meantime, stir this into the mix – some autists are savants and some savants have “super” abilities that Operating Thetans (like Tom Cruise) are supposed to have acquired, but haven’t – it’s a problem for Hubbard’s tech to be seen to not be working. By dominating the “cure autism” market, the C0$ get three things that would make it worthwhile for them 1. Access to autistic kids to study and experiment on 2. Lots of $$ from frightened parents – the rhetoric they generate themselves about how terrible autism is has penetrated deep into the public discussion 3. They get to covertly nudge a huge demographic into adopting the C0$ health paradigm and ideology, just like they’ve done with their alcohol and drug rehab centers, and their Way to Happiness school program. Be careful out there.

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  3. if you label it as “solution” i still don’t agree –implicitly you’re taking sides (¿qué es peor, el remedio o la enfermedad?) if you label it as a balancing effect –not, for example, “spiritual evolution”– now we’re on the same page, but let’s be careful with the amount of cold we add to the mix … too cold could be also counterproductive …

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    • Agreed.
      as for it being a solution – maybe to the exact same degree that its a “problem”?
      after all, if there is no such thing as a problem, then no solution is needed, or possible either.
      what perception “wants” is to be all-inclusive.

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  4. i would not say the exact same degree, since it creates an absolute value
    I would say that is a matter of relativeness: it’s a “solution”, or a “problem” when is compared to what?
    when it is contemplated from where?

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