Personality integration
Personality is the synthetic unity of all personal traits. All the mental traits—intelligence, emotions and sentiments, impulses, volitions, native and acquired reactions, must be organized and integrated into a unity. The uniting of all mental traits into personality is called integration.
Complete integration is the ideal of personality. A sound personality comprises reaction tendencies that are not loosely organized but closely related to integrated.
Once persons go through some degree of personality disintegration, they either proceed further to a condition of negative, or chronic, disintegration (Dąbrowski, 1972:299) or else they experience one or another type of personality reintegration, referred to as secondary integration. One type is that in which, following a period of personality disintegration, there is a return to primary integration, with the personality unchanged (Dąbrowski, 1964:21 & 1967:134-135). Another type is that in which there is a return to primary integration with the personality changed in the sense that there is a new directional focus, but of a non-hierarchical nature - i.e., the change is of a superficial kind while the fundamental structure of personality remains intact (Dąbrowski, 1964:21 & 1967:135-137). Dąbrowski also uses the term negative adjustment to refer to three additional types of personality integration, which occur subsequent to a process he identifies as one-sided development: (1) paranoia; (2) psychopathy; and (3) conformity to an uncritically accepted external value system.
(1) Paranoia is a way of thinking that involves feelings of distrust and suspicion about others without a good reason. It often involves thoughts that others are out to get you or are looking to harm you in some way. You can also have paranoid thoughts about threats to other people, your culture or society.
(2) Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative. Nevertheless, psychopathy is among the most difficult disorders to spot.
(3) Unqualified conformity to a hierarchy of values prevailing in a person's social environment. The values are accepted without an independent critical evaluation. It is an acceptance of an external system of values without autonomous choice. an adjustment to "what is."
Pancha, G. (n.d.). Integration and Disintegration of Personality | Psychology. Psychology Discussion. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/nXYeb
Nixon, L. (2023). Varieties of Personality Integration. Religion Department. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/poEDp
Paranoia (2024). Cleveland Clinic. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/E8Cn4
Psychopathy (n.d.). Psychology Today. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/TvrtG