Positive Maladjustment as a Transition From Chaos to Order

Abstract

Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration describes patterns and explains mechanisms of human development and has been successfully applied to understanding of gifted individuals. This article shows how the concepts of chaos theory and self-organization such as the sensitivity to initial conditions, positive and negative feedback, bifurcation points, and attractors provide new insights into understanding the personality development of gifted adolescents. According to Dabrowski, positive disintegration is the mental development described by the process of transition from lower to higher levels of mental life and is stimulated by tension, inner conflict, struggle, anxiety, and despair. This article introduces a conceptual model of this process as the sequence of transitions from a point attractor (the primary integration) through a periodic attractor (the unilevel disintegration), to a chaotic attractor (the spontaneous multilevel disintegration), and continues through the process of self-organization to an emerging order (the organized multilevel disintegration) and finally to an order with increasing complexity (the secondary integration).