3.3.7 Gifted Women's Qualitative Perspectives of Everyday Creativity, Self-Awareness, and the Education-of-Oneself from a Dabrowskian Perspective

The research reported in this session represents a qualitative study conducted with a group of gifted women who were engaged in a collective project of exploring various aspects of creativity and the self – from a Dabrowskian perspective. Related concepts include: self-education, the creative instinct, everyday creativity, self-awareness, and autopsychotherapy.

Related Concepts from the Theory of Positive Disintegration are as follows:

Education-of-oneself – Programs and methods of systematic development. This dynamism guides the realization of personal development according to a definite program built on an autonomous hierarchy of values. It entails conscious alertness and activity of converting one’s experiences and actions toward personal growth. It denotes a capacity for long-range programs of self-development.

Self-awareness – Awareness of one’s identity as a continuity of past with present, awareness of one’s uniqueness, awareness that certain distinctive personality qualities are significant and lasting while other qualities are secondary and transient. Awareness of one’s development and its direction. Awareness of a personality ideal.

Autopsychotherapy – Self-designed psychotherapy methods, preventative measures, or changes in living conditions applied to oneself in order to control possible mental disequilibrium. (Note: The individual has available to him the means not only to contain areas of conflict and tension but, even more so, to transform them into processes enriching and strengthening his development.

Process Participants engaged in a process of planned creative activity, reflection, and documentation through an individually chosen form of creative activity that involves handwork, written responses, photographs, and other visual records. Qualitative data, including participants’ writings, photos, and other documents, were analyzed through a process of interpretive phenomenological description. The project spanned a 7-week period with daily and weekly documentation from project participants.

Participatory Action Research A participatory, democratic process concerned with developing knowledge in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview… [and bringing] together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others in the pursuit of practical solutions of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and communities. Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. 2001

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Interpretative phenomenological analysis is a qualitative research approach committed to the examination of how people make sense of their major life experiences. Phenomenological inquiry focuses on that which is experienced in the consciousness of the individual. Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., and Larkin, M. 2012

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