Gifted Individuals Suffer Differently

The question for the gifted individual in the throes of psychological suffering is not: “How do I rid myself of these symptoms?”

Rather it’s:

“What do these ask of me? What do they make possible?”

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of Positive Disintegration suggests that many common symptoms — anxiety, depression, disquietude, shame, guilt, and inferiority in relation to one’s own ideals — are often positive signs of something profound at work.

They result in the disintegration necessary for further development of the individual, loosening the rigid structures and making space for the emergence of something new. They’re indicative of energy and information that have not yet been put to sufficient use, revealing a developmental potential that hasn’t yet been realized.

What is needed here is a focus on the productive process of symptom formation, not the symptoms themselves.

However, most therapies will blunt the process that’s at work, attempting merely to remove the symptoms and therefore stripping the individual of the vital resources contained therein, arresting the development of the individual.

The experience of suffering necessitates the question:

“What do I want to become of this?”

The radical psychoanalyst Fellx Guattari wrote, “The unconscious remains bound to archaic fixations only as long as there is no investment directing it towards the future.”

We cannot simply expect a restoration of our previous state.

There’s no such thing as a naive return.

Eden, the womb, the world before the wound - these are all closed as possibilities once we’ve experienced the initiation of symptom.

However, the maturing individual sees that the dissolution of familiar constructs affords the possibility of taking part in the creative reconstruction of the self.

This, of course, requires work, the throughput of energy - hence Guattari’s mention of investment.

By the way, the cyberneticians were among the first to show the similarity of work and information, each reducing entropy — chaos, disorder — in a system.

What happens when — instead of blunting the process of personality development — we learn to make use of the energy and information lying yet untapped within the symptom/system? What happens when we loosen the grip of our historical tendencies and allow ourselves to be changed?

This, my friends, is frontier practice, expanding the habitable range of psyche.

This is why I suggested at the start that these ideas are of particular relevance for the gifted individual. Technically speaking, these are the individuals with a greater openness toward experience, possessing “over-excitabilities” - heightened intelligence, emotional intensity, imaginative capacity, physical sensitivity, or sensuousness.

In Dabrowski’s model, these individuals have a greater developmental potential, able to organize at a greater level of complexity than others.

Therefore it ought not be surprising that conventional therapies, based on evidence accrued at the population level and normed to the average, are of limited use for these individuals.

What do you think - does this fit with your experience?