Why Is Pain Necessary For Growth?
Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration
The compassion of the contemporary therapeutic establishment has stunted the development of countless people. Okay, hold up, maybe that is a bit extreme. However, I think it may not be as far off the mark as you think. A common criticism from within psychology is that we define mental health as a mere absence of negative symptoms or as adjustment to “normality”, whatever that actually means.1,2,3,4 The basic, simplified idea is that we’ve often made the goal of treatment to primarily be getting rid of pain. So, in this essay, I’ll be offering an alternative called Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, or the idea that emotional pain may not actually be a bad thing in all cases.1,2
Now, to many of you watching this may seem counterintuitive. If someone is experiencing anxiety, depression, intense shame, or simply feels stuck in life, wouldn’t the goal be to get rid of all of that pain? In some cases, yes, so I want to be clear that this video is not a low nuanced attack on therapy or medications. I want to make that very, very clear. Both of these approaches have helped a lot of people dealing with a lot of pain. However, in too many cases, this “getting rid of pain” approach can actually prevent people from making the development they need. This is especially true when we consider how therapeutic concepts get simplified and distorted within popular consciousness.
Think about the consequences when we say that any mental suffering is some sort of “illness” that needs to be “cured”. This implies that there is nothing wrong with the character of the person who experiences this pain. It implies that mental illness works like a physical disease where they’ve been infected by the cold of depression, or perhaps they lost the genetic lottery and they were simply born with depression or anxiety. In either case, the assumption is that they are a passive recipient of mental suffering, and that all they need to do is take a pill to make them normal again, which obviously means not feeling any sort of pain.
The issue is that in our attempts to be compassionate and to help people through their very real pain, we may have actually disempowered them. Even my implying before that there might be something “wrong” with mentally ill people’s character may have raised alarm bells. It sounds like I’m blaming people who are the victims of a disease. Therapy often tries to help clients see that they aren’t to blame and that there isn’t something wrong with them.
I appreciate these goals very much, but according to Dabrowski, sometimes all of this pain isn’t a sign that they have an illness or bad genetics. Instead, he believed that much of what we call mental illness is actually a positive sign of growth. By making our goal “getting rid of pain” we have unintentionally removed the means by which people grow.
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New Levels, New Devils
Either way, to get a hold of Dabrowski’s ideas, the first thing you need to understand is his idea that people move through levels of increasing individuality. Also, for those of you who know the models I’m going to be aligning, there is an extra note linked at the one just right up there.1 It’s kind of like you’re a video game character where each level gives you more skills. At Level 1, or Conformist, we find about 50 % of the population.5,6 To be Conformist kind of means that they sacrifice their individuality in the name of their group.
To be clear though, they don’t do this because they choose to, but almost because they have to. Even me saying that they have an individuality to sacrifice, is giving them too much. Who they are as a person is intimately bound to their group. They aren’t so much their own person, but are a Christian, are a conservative, are even a feminist or atheist. The point is that they think “this is what my group is like, and that is exactly who I am and must be”.
If you watched my playlist “The Psychospiritual Prison,” then you know the structure of the external compass we as men are given by our culture. We use this compass to guide us through our lives and to help us make decisions, and all we’re really after is approval that we’re a good member of our group. Remember, this is who we are, and so we need our group to validate, “yes that is who you are, you are one of us”. We also assume that this compass guides us to the normal, natural, and moral way of things. Dr. William Tillier describes people at this level as:2
“the average person, [where] behavior is controlled by … the external forces of socialization.”
As you can imagine, non-conformity can be quite painful to the Conformist. If you literally believe that the way you think about the world is the only good way to think about the world, then the moment you’re forced to think differently you automatically assume you’re doing something wrong.
Connect that with what I said before that many people who enter therapy have to be taught that there isn’t something wrong with them. How many people who come to therapy are there not because they have a mental disease, but because they’ve been confronted with the pain of non-conformity? This is Level 2, called Unilevel Disintegration. I’ll explain what that means in a moment. Dr. William Tillier says:2
“the prominent features of this level are initial, brief, and often intense crises… [where] the security…of day-to-day adjustment breaks down…,”
The general idea at Level 2 is that the person is experiencing an increase in pain and confusion, but they don’t necessarily know why and often blame the environment. Remember, they’ve been living their typical life, never really having any reason to question their culture or way of thining, and then suddenly, they’re confronted with a situation in the environment that shatters or disintegrates their ideas of the typical life. It’s a Positive Disintegration, it can be positive as we’ll see, but it’s still a disintegration, it can be very painful.
For example, think about what something like a breakup implies for someone who defines themselves purely based on their group. As a Level 1 Conformist, they are bound to their role as boyfriend because that is who they are. A breakup is an emotionally violent othering. We saw ourselves as being one with the relationship, only to be confronted with the reality that we’re an outsider. Our group, tightly knit by romance, affection, and shared memories, has been shown to be a false reality. The person we loved and who loved us, who completed us, is now shown to be a stranger, and that means that we are a stranger to ourselves.
At Level 2, we suddenly become Self-Conscious – or conscious of ourselves as separate from our group – I am not her boyfriend anymore. This process may also begin by going to university where you’re confronted with a new situation that is very different from your family home or high school. In whatever form it takes, the non-conformity we face requires a new way of thinking that we cannot yet really put a name to, but that begins to fray the edges of our worldview. Dr. Cook-Greuter says that the Self-Conscious:5
“want to be accepted by others because of how they are different and special.”
So at Level 2 there’s this weird stance where you want to be your own person, but in a way that earns approval from your group. Cook-Greuter says that they need this because they “cannot yet prioritize among options,” and so they often depend on the newest procedure that offers the best solution.5 They understand what’s expected of them by the group, so they’re looking to be the best at fulfilling that expectation.
The major point about being Self-Conscious or Level 2, is this idea of being “unilevel”, or one levelled. Again, they can’t prioritize to say one value or goal is better than another. The inner conflict that emerges with self-consciousness doesn’t fundamentally change their view of reality, and so their goals are still determined largely by the external compass of their culture. They rely on experts to tell them what to do. They straddle this weird halfway point where they’re almost Conformist, but not quite. You want to become the most special of the Conformists in a way.
If you remember from my video on Akedia, one of the ways in which we have meaning in life is through coherence, through the world and our place in that world making sense. When you’ve begun to disintegrate, but the world is still on the same level, there’s no real sense of direction. To be unilevel, again one levelled, means that there is no place to go away from where you currently are. Maybe that means finding a new relationship, and telling yourself that this one will finally complete you. Or, perhaps it means becoming the best boyfriend she’s ever had, bending over backward so that she won’t leave you, and you won’t be forced into self-consciousness again.
This is why the Unilevel Disintegration of the Self-Conscious can often be short-lived. If things are very painful, things are incoherent and don’t make sense, and you don’t have a solid enough sense of direction, then there’s a need to escape from the new freedom you’ve found. Cook-Greuter says that they can put on a front, where they act as if they know more, as if they have it all figured out. Maybe they even convince themselves that they do. The point is that they have to deny that there is a problem in order to find some stability.
However, I think there is a very real problem. David Chapman has said that now more than in the recent past, people are having difficulty moving away from Conformity.7 So, let’s try to connect some dots. Firstly, no matter what your beliefs are, I think most of us can agree that our society is pretty unstable right now. In the Psychospiritual Prison series, I argue that our external compass of masculinity has become more reactionary, because we’re often caught between the vicious fighting of traditional masculinity and progressive masculinity.8
The connection I’m trying to make here is that our entire cultural moment occupies that weird stance of Unilevel Disintegration. Personally, I tend to be on the Left, and so even as a Canadian the recent election of Donald Trump genuinely worries me. We feel pressured to conform to our group because we feel under attack by Republican’s completely controlling the government. There’s this pull to come together and figure out how we can defend against this, and obviously, the Right feels the same way. Political polarization has basically created a very harsh us vs. them.
All of that means that everyone’s conformity is constantly being attacked by a non-conformity, by some other vision of morality that threatens to fray the borders of our worldviews. Traditional masculinity vs. progressive masculinity, the war between them keeps either pushing into their own conformity while simultaneously being pushed into disintegration by the continual confrontation with non-conformity. Then, like I said at the beginning of this essay, we have this idea of mental health where the goal is getting rid of pain.
Each of us is being pulled apart so that everything we could possibly do just makes us feel what we’ve been told is mental illness. It’s a disease, an illness, and the cure is getting rid of the pain. Furthermore, in our society, we have easy access to so much pleasure. We have porn, drugs, video games, binge-watching Netflix, doom scrolling, scrolling through endless feeds on TikTok, being exposed to beautiful lifestyle after beautiful lifestyle that is far better than our own, all of these working together to numb us to our world and self disintegrating our around us.9
We’re locked, culturally and individually, in that weird stance of unilevel disintegration where we’re too Self-Conscious to be a Conformist and yet we’re not really a true individual because our group is in constant threat from the outside. Our only way to deal with the pain of this radical incoherence and nihilism is through numbing ourselves to it, because that reduces the pain even if temporarily, and that’s what mental health is supposed to be, right?
Beholding the Vertical
So what’s the solution here? Dabrowski says that the “cure” for mental suffering is not to get rid of the pain, but to make use of the pain. This brings us to Level 3, or Spontaneous Multilevel Disintegration. Yes, I know another term, but just think about the words in the term. If unilevel is one-levelled where things are as they’ve always been, multilevel is where we make a distinction between the way things are and the way things could be. At Level 3, there is now a hierarchy where we can begin to prioritize of our own accord, based on our own thinking, another skill that Level 2 just didn’t really have yet. It depended on its culture to make that priority for it.1,2
However, think about what multilevel implies. If things could be different, if things could be better, than they are now, then that means things staying the same is a bad thing. With multilevelness my inner conflict becomes far more conscious. More importantly, I now feel this as being far more my responsibility than I did when I was unilevel. There’s a fundamental shift where we think, “I thought I understood life; now I don’t understanding anything.”1
Cook-Greuter calls Level 3, Conscientious, and says it’s where we really start to gain a capacity for authoring ourselves.5 A benefit of being very conscious of our inner conflict is that we can start making use of that inner conflict to make ourselves better. Remember, Level 2 was Self-Conscious, meaning that they were conscious of being separate from the group. However, that just meant they could desire to be the most special by the standards of the group. At Level 3 Conscientious, I can now turn inward and see how I could be different from who I currently am.
So let’s say you’ve just had a breakup. You feel ashamed because you were acting so confident that she loved you, only to have her shove in your face that you were less than you thought were. Perhaps she started dating soon after, and now you’re feeling inadequate to the new guy. What does he have that you don’t? Again, at Level 2, you feel separate from the group, but you’re likely just going to blame her. She wasn’t really worth it, she was kind of a bitch always negging me, I’m better off without her, etc., etc.
This may seem really immature, but relative to Level 1, Level 2 is doing better. Level 1 Conformist would be desperate to get her back, because his entire sense of self is dependent on being her boyfriend. Level 2 Self-Conscious has a hostility, but it’s a functional hostility that helps them move away from the relationship. So Level 1 might want to get back together, Level 2 would be hostile toward his girlfriend, and Level 3 Conscientious would start to wonder, “why am I not enough?”
Level 3 Conscientious would start blaming himself, but that’s what actually allows him to start working on himself. Maybe he starts going to the gym, maybe he starts reading books on how to be a better boyfriend, or how to be more socially outgoing so he can meet a new girlfriend. Again, the point is that because Level 3 can blame himself for not being enough, he can actually start becoming better at even some of the same goals that the other levels had. They stay the same and try to pursue the same goals. Level 3 tries to get better and maybe even pursues the same goals or pursues some altogether different goals.
And yet, if the contemporary view of mental health is to love yourself and accept yourself just the way you are, then there’s no real way to say, “no, I fucked up and I need to do better. I am to blame, I feel ashamed, I feel guilty, and I need to do something about that. I am not okay, I am not acceptable…but I can become more acceptable to myself.”
This is where Level 3 really distinguishes itself from all the previous levels. Remember that a key point for understanding this entire theory is that we have to be able to make use of the pain. If it’s too much for any level we can’t make use of it because it overpowers us. Additionally, every human has the ability to feel bad, to feel ashamed, and to blame themselves. Of course they can, but the real thing that sets Level 3 Conscientious apart, is that he can finally begin to make use of the pain toward his own goals and values.
If you had blamed yourself before, you were trying to become more like what your culture expected of you, now you become more of what you expect of yourself. Dabrowski’s theory is one of increasing individuality as you ascend the levels. However, Level 3 still has its limitations. Cook-Greuter says that while the Level 3 Conscientious pursues:5
“one’s [own] ideals and values. These are often the ones currently most salient in the cultural surround.”
Furthermore, Schläppy says:10
“Some values remain the same as before and some change drastically toward new, self-chosen values…”
In other words, Level 3 is starting to define their own values, but they can only really do this by picking through the values on offer, the values of their culture. Schläppy goes on to say that a therapist can, “thwart a person’s developing personality and push them back toward level II and ultimately level I.”
So let’s connect those dots with an example. In my series on the Psychospiritual Prison, I make the point that a lot of the masculine tribes we’re seeing pop up are because of men being a little bit above Conformity. These tribes include Red Pill, NoFap, and Men Going There Own Way. I think these men may actually be Level 3, and this is what makes these tribes so dangerous.
So for example, let’s say you’re a guy who has just learned about NoFap. This is the perfect example of what I mean by our culture keeping someone oscillating between Level I and Level II. Your issues with porn are numbing you to the fact that you’re lonely, in poor physical health, and you don’t have much of anything to do other than video games or watching TV. Then, you find out about NoFap and realize that this general feeling of malaise that comes over you every so often might be because of porn. So you try to quit, you fail, you try, you fail, you realize oh my god I’m addicted, I need to quit this thing.
At that moment you have moved past the oscillation between Level I and Level II, and become multilevel. Now there’s the porn addicted self that you currently are which is less than your ideal self, or the disciplined, sexually pure monk you think you have to be. Again, you’re challenging the status quo that says accept your sexuality, masturbation is healthy, watch as much porn as you want. Obviously that’s not completely bad, you should accept your sexuality, masturbation in moderation can fine, but that’s then used to justify a relationship to porn that may be unhealthy, especially relative to the lack of experience with real life partners and other healthy hobbies.
Now you’re getting control over your sexuality, you’re going to the gym, you’re meditating, all things that NoFap advocates for. The multilevel between porn addict and monk is helping you become more Level 3 Conscientious. On top of that, NoFap acts as a funnel into Red Pill that promises to answer your dating troubles that were caused by porn. You learn that we live in a gynocracy, women seek high value men, and you’re given a system to become that high value man who is the best man you could possibly be.
I think this is a perfect example of what Schläppy means when a therapist might thwart someone’s development and send them back to Level 1 Conformist.10 Obviously NoFap and Red Pill are not therapists, but they act as a substitute therapist, helping men take legitimate action in their lives. However, the way the ideology functions is to send them back downward to Conformist. Not necessarily in the sense that they become exactly as they were, but in the sense that they become Conformist to the Red Pill ideology itself. They get sucked so deeply into Red Pill ideology that they can’t question it, and they become bound to it, saying, “this is what my group Red Pill is, and that is exactly the kind of man I am.”
It’s progress beyond the original status quo, but clearly locked back within Conformity. You can see how multilevelness, the ability to prioritize between different options, doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is fully free. The fact that Level 3 Conscientious is still embedded in their culture, means that their new capacity to choose their own values, to create their own internal compass, still isn’t quite enough. They can turn the blame inward and convert into responsibility. It’s not a disempowering self-blame, again, they can make use of that internal conflict. Unfortunately, while still within the bounds of their culture. In this case, in the very resentful ideology of Red Pill that gives them standards to achieve, and a scapegoat to blame for everything else in the form of feminism.
The fact that our cultural moment is so polarized, means that there are more than enough opportunities to break the status quo by moving into an entirely different Conformity. Different, but Conformity all the same.
Disembedding from the Cultural Surround
To prevent this kind of trap from happening requires we move to Level 4 Directed Multilevel Disintegration. As the name Directed implies, at Level 4 you gain much more control over your values and goals.1 The reason this is such a huge step is explained by Cook-Greuter, where she says that the Level 4 Individualist can:5
“stand outside the system they grew up in and observe themselves and their [culture’s] … assumptions, values, and beliefs.”
Now you’re not just picking and choosing from the values on offer from your culture, but you’re actually able to question the culture, question the status quo. You can say, “yeah maybe watching too much porn is unhealthy, I should probably put myself out there more and have some real experiences, but…that whole Red Pill thing is making all these assumptions about how men are and how women are that probably have more to do with a patriarchal, capitalist culture, for example, than their shoddy understanding of evolutionary psychology.”
So to use our breakup example, Level 1 would be desperate to get back together or to find another relationship. Level 2 would experience a functional hostility where he say “I never needed her anyway” because he now sees himself as separate from her, but he would likely still blame her. Level 2 may sink back down to Level 1, or he may find a role model “really cool guy” like Andrew Tate and try to become exactly like him. Level 3 however, would make use of that blame and start to self-reflect, trying to figure out what they did wrong and how they can improve according to their own selection of the cultural values on offer. Level 4 would start questioning those cultural values, like perhaps questioning monogamy itself and considering polyamory.
To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Level 4 would become polyamorous. The point is that they would be able to question fundamental cultural assumptions surrounding relationships according to their own values. Additionally, it’s possible that every level could do any of the things I just listed, it’s just why they’re doing that. If someone at Level 2 found a role model who was polyamorous, they might also become polyamorous. However, it’s not because they’re questioning cultural norms according to their own values, but because they were influenced by a charismatic enough role model. So I hope that distinction makes sense. It can be a bit difficult to fully wrap your mind around this stuff, so don’t worry if it seems a bit confusing right now.
Returning to the Red Pill example, you can now see how much the values of these masculine tribes are still embedded and defined by a certain cultural context. So to be clear, I know I’m picking on masculine tribes that tend to be more conservative. By nature of being progressive, progressive circles tend to challenge the status quo more often. However, like I’ve argued in previous videos, it’s not just the group itself. If you’re Level 2, you’re feeling the pressure of being removed from your group, and then if you discover Lefitst politics, it’s still possible that you go back down to Level 1. At that point, you’ve now turned Leftism into a new Conformity, “this is what a Leftist is, and that is what I am.”
As the Level 4 Individualist however, you’re far better able to question the underlying assumptions of any group. You’re never perfect, we’re all human, and so it’s not as if you suddenly become completely resistant to all super hostile, us vs. them, tribal thinking. Again though, at Level 4, this is much less likely to happen, because you’re far more defined by an internal compass that is more concerned with defining yourself based on your own inner reflection. If something happens, you become biased toward introspection, thinking you’re way through the situation, and a self-directed making sense of things. This could lead to an honouring of the individuality of others, or it could lead to hostility.
This in turn, allows you to move to Level 5, or Autonomous. Cook-Greuter says:5
“The crucial new capacity is to realize one’s power to generate meaning and to tell a coherent self-story by creating it.”
There’s so much more I could say, but my hopes that this would be a shorter video have not turned out as planned. And really most of us are just not Level 5 Autonomous yet, myself included. The vast majority of you watching, just based on the statistics, are likely just Level 2 or 3. That’s not a bad thing, that’s just where you currently are. I would be surprised if anyone Level 1 is still watching. The way I’ve talked about Conformity by relating it to conservatism and Red Pill, but also feminism, atheism, and Leftist politics, means that I’ve unfortunately alienated every Conformist.
So again, I’m not trying to call anyone out. It doesn’t matter what the group is, the values, the belief system, or whatever. It matters how the person engages with it, and a Conformist is by definition going to have difficulty hearing anything that might be negative about the way they engage with their group. They assume their group is perfect so there couldn’t be criticism.
So that’s a good litmus test for yourself. Can you hear and consider constructive criticism of your group? If you can’t without getting really triggered, that might be an indication that you want to stop and think through these issues a little bit more. Again, it’s not to say that the criticism is correct, but a kneejerk reaction against criticism can be an issue.
With that said, the three biggest takeaways I want you to get from this essay are:
1. Emotional pain and internal conflict aren’t necessarily bad things.
2. You must have the capacity to channel that pain toward an ideal you actually care about. Learning to deal with emotional pain in healthy ways is one of the most important things. Not to get rid of the pain, but to grow with the pain. Future videos will go more into that, but you can already get a sense of how to do that.
3. Finally, write these levels down in a table with level 1 at the bottom and level 5 at the top. Understand these, get familiar with them. This video was such a superficial look at these that in some ways I may have led you astray. As a rough outline it will help you understand my videos so much better. Someone commented on my video, “The Evolutionary Necessity of Myth” that it was an incredibly gluing video that helped him understand all of my other videos. This is another very gluing video.
Either way, that’s more than enough for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you like this essay, please find the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Tillier, W. (2018). Personality Development Through Positive Disintegration: The Work of Kazimierz Dabrowski (Illustrated edition). Maurice Bassett.
2 – Dabrowski, K. & Tillier W. (2017). Positive Disintegration. Maurice Bassett.
3 – Maddux, J. E. (2021). Stopping the “madness”: Positive psychology and deconstructing the illness ideology and the DSM. In C. R. Snyder, S. J. Lopez, L. M. Edwards, & S. C. Marques (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of positive psychology (3rd ed., pp. 73–87). Oxford University Press.
4 – Basseches, M. (2003). Adult Development and the Practice of Psychotherapy. In J. Demick & C. Andreoletti (Eds.), Handbook of Adult Development (pp. 533–563). Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0617-1_28
5 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
6 – Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
7 – Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence | Vividness. (2015, October 12). https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
8 – Cameron, W. (2024b, November 1). The Psychospiritual Prison [Substack newsletter]. MetaMasculine. https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/the-psychospiritual-prison
9 – Cameron, W. (2024a, October 17). Psychology of Epithymia [Substack newsletter]. MetaMasculine. https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/psychology-of-epithymia
10 – Schläppy, M.-L. (2019). Understanding Mental Health Through the Theory of Positive Disintegration: A Visual Aid. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1291. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01291
Note for the alignment:
References specific to this note included at the bottom of this note. References also in main text found there.
Bailey (2011) is the only study I could find trying to connect Positive Disintegration (PD) with Ego Development (ED). Although, she used Loevinger’s model rather than Cook-Greuter (2021). I am not familiar enough with Loevinger to know the differences, but I do know that Cook-Greuter offers an updated model especially in regards to post-autonomous development.
There are three important notes from Bailey’s research, and then my concluding remarks.
1. Bailey finds a slight positive correlation between PD and ED, which she interprets as these being two distinct constructs. My thought is that PD is specifically about high degrees of mental suffering during development, especially among gifted populations, which is the population, at least to my knowledge, that PD has been most studied with. ED then, according to me, is about what the PD Level looks like when it is more stable, with a greater similarity to PD found as individuals transition between stages or as mental suffering increases for whatever reason.
2. The fact that Bailey’s study is on a population of gifted adolescents is very important as this is obviously a population that is different in age from my intended audience, especially in regards to the possible presence of neurodivergence.
3. The biggest discrepancy between her alignment and mine is that she aligns Level 1 Primary Integration with Loevinger’s Impulsive, and then goes up from there. No offense to Bailey, but this strikes me as a very confusing move (I don’t blame her, as you’ll see). Primary Integration is the average adult (see below) and she is aligning it with something Cook-Greuter says is extremely uncommon in adulthood. Again, Bailey is literally working with children, but even if they were neurodivergent this alignment still makes very little sense to me.
On Level I Primary Integration, Tillier (2018) writes, “Dąbrowski used the terms psychopath, psychopathy, primitive and primary synonymously in describing Level I (Dąbrowski, 1964b, pp. 73-75). He differentiated sociopathy from psychopathy; sociopathy is the failure to achieve one’s full development due to the influence of social or environmental factors. Psychopathy is the failure to achieve full development due to biological and genetic causes … In the average person, behavior is controlled by a combination of primitive instincts and drives and by the external forces of socialization. Behavior occurs reflexively and automatically in response to stimuli, with little consciousness or awareness; thus, there is no opportunity for reflection or real self-control. Behavioral responses occur in stereotypic fashion, emanating from social conditioning. Both thinking and emotions are experienced through this social filter with an emphasis upon roles, expectations, and socially correct responses.”
Tillier (2018) also quotes Dabrowski - “‘the average person’ (about 65% of the population) is at Level I”
In my mind, this speaks to a theoretical limitation (and possibly empirical given the age of Dabrowski’s original research) of Positive Disintegration. Cook-Greuter (2021) and Kegan (1998) say that the average person is somewhere between Conformist/Socialized Mind and Self-Authoring (inclusive). Additionally, Cook-Greuter (2021) reports that 0.4 - 4.3% of adults are Impulsive, a far cry from “average”.
I think what is going on is that PD smashes together Pre-Conformist and Conformist stages without making an adequate distinction between them. The description above about Level 1’s connection with socialization, social roles, social expectations, social filter, etc., is very obviously Conformist/Socialized Mind (as do other descriptions in the writings of both Tillier and Dabrowski of course).
Unfortunately, Pre-Conformist traits are then brought up to discuss the conflated category (Pre-Conformist and Conformist) as if all members of these multiple stages have all the discussed traits.
There is also a lack of distinguishing between ED and culture. Both Fromm (1941) and Bauman (2000) describe the individualizing of Western populations under late capitalism. It seems to me that a lot of what Dabrowski criticizes (dog-eat-dog mentality, for example) may be an artefact of capitalist individuality rather than ED, or rather than PD Primary Integration as psychopathy. Although, I should grant that Dabrowski may mean something different from the contemporary understanding of psychopathy (Schläppy 2019 specifically says his use of terms was often unique to him).
We also have to take into consideration the differences in the cultural context in which Dabrowski created his theory relative to Kegan and to Cook-Greuter.
Cook-Greuter (2021) states this explicitly in regards to Self-Conscious, “While conformism was widely spread during Loevinger’s time, we now find few people operating at the early conventional, Conformist stage in our subject pools. In the sixties, consciousness raising efforts on all fronts have contributed to this social shift from [Conformist]* to [Self-Conscious]* as a desired and accepted shift in consciousness. Finding your own voice and becoming your separate self identity as an adult is the most widely supported and rewarded movement especially in the modern West with its emphasis on agency and individualism. The transformation from being a part of a group identity to finding one’s separate identity and finding one’s voice is in many ways the task of healthy adolescent development.”
* Changed for the terms I use in the main text of my essay.
This adds evidence to my statements on late capitalism. How much of what we think about any of these stages has more to do with culture than with individual human development? If the cultural context is one in which disintegration of conformity is idolized and provided for, then we’re not only far more likely to see Post-Conformist individuals, but they’ll also likely be far more stable than what Dabrowski would expect. In the 1960s it may have taken far more to move from Level 1 to Level 2, whereas today it may take far more to STAY at Level 1. This is something I argue explicitly in the main text of my essay. Our cultural moment seems to me to be far more defined by an oscillation between Level 1 and Level 2, rather than stability at Level 1. Or, perhaps Level 1 simply looks far less stable, while still being more akin to Level 1. I lean more toward the former.
Either way, I think my analysis lands well. Cook-Greuter’s description of the stages between Conformist and Conscientious/Self-Authoring (her alignment) speaks very clearly to the same kinds of things we see with Dabrowski and Tillier’s descriptions of Level 1, 2, and 3, as you see in the main text of my essay. The only thing that muddies the water is the inclusion of statements that connect Pre-Conformist behaviour with Level 1, which led Bailey to make an alignment that simply doesn’t fit with the demographics outlined above.
Finally, to add some further credence to my alignment, Tillier (2018) himself discusses both Kegan and Cook-Greuter, and speaks to the consonance between Kegan and Dabrowski. Unfortunately he doesn’t say much explicitly about their actual alignment. However, Tillier’s description of Kegan’s Imperial Mind (Pre-Conformist) and Interpersonal (Conformist) implies little more than exactly what I’ve said - there are two stages in Kegan that sound fascinatingly similar to Level 1 Primary Integration.
My Conclusions:
All in all, I think the biggest thing we need to accept, which Bailey also says, is that there just isn’t enough research aligning these models.
So, key point for my work here, I am not offering this as a rigorous scientific alignment but more as a personal toolkit for self-development. I think the way I have presented the information makes more sense given what I know about the two models, but I’m open to being wrong. Again though, I think my presentation of the information for the purposes of aiding the reader’s development is enough to justify the way in which it has been aligned. That purpose is specifically to make the more simplified claims that:
1. Emotional pain and internal conflict are not necessarily bad signs, and may actually be signs of growth.
2. One must be able and willing to choose to make use of whatever emotional pain and internal conflict they do experience in service of their own personal development.
3. There are stages from Conformity to Autonomy, and it can be painful on the way.
Bailey, C. L. (2011). An Examination of the Relationships Between Ego Development, Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, and the Behavioral Characteristics of Gifted Adolescents. Gifted Child Quarterly, 55(3), 208–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986211412180
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart, inc.