Living Life With Intensity: Overexcitability Lesson

This week we enjoyed an exciting class reflecting on topics specific to gifted psychology. Overexcitabilities are one aspect of a personal philosophy called "The Theory of Positive Disintegration" developed by the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. To start, Dabrowski thought of “overexcitabilities” as “developmental potential” for highly original thinkers. In other words, these are the factors that launch someone on a unique path and unique trajectory as a gifted individual.

According to his theory, these are the five overexcitabilities that can cause people who are gifted to be quite intense:

- Imaginational

- Intellectual

- Psychomotor

- Sensual (five senses)

- Emotional

We went through a definition of each of these along with some checklists to see which ones students identified with the most (maybe all five)!

Some lingering questions to consider include:

  • Why would overexcitabilities set someone on a unique path in life? 

  • What overexcitability dominates you the most? How do you think other people react to it when it shows up in you?

  • Compare and contrast imagination with intelligence.  Why do you think Dabrowski separated out these categories? How is imagination different from intelligence? How are they related?

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