Morality, Ethics, and Gifted Minds by Tracy Cross & Don Ambrose

Author:Tracy Cross & Don Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer US, Boston, MA

14.13 14.13 Multilevel Development

Theories that address moral development tend toward a “progression from rigidity, self-absorption, and dependence on authority to more sophistication, flexibility and independence as mature persons” but differ as to “what causes movement from one stage to the next” (Tannenbaum 1998, p. 99). For Dabrowski true moral development begins with the experience of inner conflict between lower and higher levels in oneself. The lower levels contain all that one finds in oneself unbecoming, even disgusting and reprehensible. The higher levels contain all that one finds desirable and ideal. It is a “multilevel” conflict. This concept of “multilevelness” can be applied to almost any behavior and human phenomenon. Its great value lies in making possible to sort out experience and behavior according to level. For instance love on a low level will be possessive, dominating, and controlling, while love on a high level will be nonpossessive and with the highest regard for the object of love (Dabrowski 1977). The theory found confirmation in cross-cultural validation of overexcitability profiles and in several empirical tests (Falk et al. 1997, 2008; Piechowski 1975, 2008).2 Dabrowski linked the potential for multilevel development with the strength of emotional, intellectual, and imaginational overexcitabilities.

For the understanding of emotional growth of gifted children, the distinction between a unilevel and a multilevel developmental process is the most relevant (Piechowski 2008). In unilevel process values are relative rather than universal, inner conflicts are recycled rather than resolved, relationships with others do not have a steady footing. Trying every new trend, following fads, being guided primarily by others' opinions is an individual without a psychological center. The shifting nature of the person's identity depends on the circumstances. Such is often the self of an adolescent. When the process intensifies it becomes unilevel disintegration.

A change comes when the person begins to tire of this state of affairs with its meaningless emotional treading water and growing malaise. The search for a way out starts with the realization of the possibility of a more meaningful focus in life. A sense of higher and lower in oneself opens new horizons. Sensing the possibility of something higher in oneself engenders the feeling of inferiority, not to others but toward oneself. It is an inferiority before one's unrealized, more evolved and ideal self. Soon this feeling of inferiority toward oneself is followed by an array of inner currents and rifts with descriptive names like disquietude with oneself, dissatisfaction with oneself, positive maladjustment, and so on. What they all have in common is the vertical axis of self-evaluation, that judges the distance from the higher in oneself, which attracts, and grows a stronger reaction against the lower in oneself, which repels. Dabrowski firmly believed that moral exemplars share human values that are universal. His theory details out the process of development through inner transformation (Dabrowski 1967).

When we can spot in a young person an inner dialogue, self-judgment, distress over a moral conflict, we have in front of us a multilevel process. The introspective emotional growth mentioned earlier,

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