Kazimierz Dąbrowski  Kazimierz Dąbrowski (September 1, 1902 in Klarów – November 26, 1980 in Warsaw) was a Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, and physician. He is best known for his theory of "Positive disintegration", as a stage in personality development. He was also a poet and used the pen name of "Paul Cienin/Paweł Cienin". Kazimierz Dąbrowski was born into a Catholic family on a country estate near Lublin, in the Russian sector of Poland, the third son of four children to Antoni, an estate administrator, and his wife. When he was six, the youngest child, a daughter aged three, died of meningitis. Kazimierz was initially schooled at home. Later he attended "Stefan Batory" secondary school in Lublin. During World War I he was deeply shocked by the sight of the bodies of fallen soldiers strewn across a battlefield. At 16, having falsified his age, he gained access to the newly opened University of Lublin, where he attended the Polish language programme. At 18, he was admitted to Warsaw University to study Medicine. After two years he transferred to the University of Poznan where he attained a medical degree and had begun studies in psychology. He next moved on to the University of Geneva where he worked with Edouard Claparede and Jean Piaget and where in 1929 he gained a Phd with a thesis on suicide, under professor F. Naville. He gained a second Phd in psychology at the University of Poznan in 1931 as a broader development on the theme of self-harm, including asceticism and sadomasochism. Around 1930 he had married for the first time. The marriage was short-lived as his wife died of tuberculosis in the mid-1930s. With help from the Rockefeller Foundation he was able to travel for post-doctoral studies in Europe and North America. From 1932 Dąbrowski spent about two years in Vienna undergoing an abbreviated psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Stekel, a former collaborator of Sigmund Freud. At the same time he did post-graduate studies in neurology with Otto Marburg, in developmental psychology with Karl Ludwig Bühler and his wife, Charlotte Bühler, also a psychology professor, and in Neurophysiology with the Austrian physician, Wilhelm Schlesinger. Circa 1935, after the death of his wife, he went to the USA.