It’s easy to tell if you don’t fit in; it’s harder to know what to do about it. In this piece, Leon Garber explores contrarianism, the rejecting of norms just for the sake of rejecting them, and how to move from such rebellion to a truer sort of authentic personality.
For our issue on non/conformity, we have the perfect book to feature: the story of a heretic.
After his brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy faced a disintegration. Though it was brutal, it was also a positive one, demonstrating the power of overexcitability when fueled by high-level courage. Bobby’s ill-fated campaign ultimately showed glimmers of level V, the highest level of personal development.
Years before I first heard the term “positive disintegration,” I was struck by the process as it played out in a biography of Robert F. Kennedy. Intense, quirky, and with a sense of the epic, RFK and his life journey reveal the human drama beneath Kazimierz Dabrowski’s academic jargon, showcasing overexcitability, dynamisms, and inner psychic transformation in all its dramatic glory.
In this elegantly crafted, piercingly insightful piece, psychologist Elizabeth Mika describes precisely why the theory of positive disintegration is the right theory for the Trump era.
