“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!
This is a poem by Kazimierz Dabrowski, the Polish psychologist whose Theory of Positive Disintegration I am studying at the moment. He discerns five levels of development any personality will/should go through, and explicitly states questioning, stumbling, falling, picking up the pieces and regrouping over and over again is to be applauded, not scoffed at.
Don’t you just love that? All too often, ‘normality’ challenges the ‘abnormality’ of the ones that actively seek to break down their personality (which, I think, in many people is a crude construct of the Ego/Brain combo leaning heavily on input from the outer world). Seekers go against the grain: they look at the separate elements of their personality closely, play around with them and then find everything they really need is there, with a few spare parts thrown in for the heck of it. The trick is to learn what to keep, and what to dispose of.
Personality development seems to be about simplification more than anything else. But simple, as I think you all agree, is not the same as easy. Some of the simplest choices are the hardest to make. Dabrowski theorized that only at Level 5 of his scale (“All personal values are sustained and in alignment with the highest universal moral values. The individual is actively creating solutions and aims to improve society at large.”) the personality would not revert to old behavioral patterns.
I’m nowhere near level 5, but I do recognize a lot in his dissection. And though I am quite sure I am not psychoneurotic at the moment (at least not in a destructive way), I know I have been in the past.
It is good to know this can be construed as a POSITIVE thing, something to cherish even.