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ERIC ED371548: Feeling Bad Can Be Good: Using Dabrowski's Theory To Reframe Gifted Children's Adjustment Difficulties.

Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration is applied to counseling gifted students having emotional and adjustment problems. According to the theory, a central feature of psychological growth is a series of disintegrations--progressive contradictions and conflicts that arise from a person's experience of life. Such conflicts and disintegrations become a fundamental, inevitable, and positive component of development. Dabrowski sees over-excitability as one critical aspect of developmental potential, including psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional over-excitability. Dabrowski outlines five levels in the process of psychological development from the social integrated self of Level 1 through varying degrees of disintegration to a second functional integration comprised of a critically thinking, autonomous self governed by authentic emotions. Gifted students possess strong intrinsic developmental potential and exhibit the over-excitability, conflicts, disintegrations, and reintegrations of advanced development. Dabrowski's theory advocates an individualized educational approach utilizing a developmental counseling perspective. (Contains 10 refere

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