Integrity and integration of personality in the process of experiencing one’s own destructiveness

A personality’s experience of their own destructiveness is becoming increasingly important in the life context of a modern person. Despite the intensive growth of research interest in the problems of destructive behavior and human destructiveness, the question of the role of the integral personality system in the implementation of destructive activity remains unclear. The article deals with the theoretical and methodological problem of the correlation between the concepts of destructive behavior and personality integrity. The traditional understanding of destructiveness in scientific discourse assumes the definition of this phenomenon as a «dark» and negative property of a «disintegrated» personality, as well as the emphasis on destructive behavior as being conditioned by mental disorders and irregularities in emotional-volitional regulation. At the same time, phenomenological analysis of the experience of one’s own destructiveness allows us to detect the subject’s activity and involvement, volitional initiation and realization of destructive actions and deeds. It is only at first glance that destruction and integrity seem to be oppositions through which we can describe the inner conflict of a personality and ambivalent tendencies in intrapersonal dynamics. The process approach to personality research allows us to consider binary oppositions through the prism of the principle of complementarity, according to which opposite personality tendencies are complementary. In this connection, a personality’s experience of their own destructiveness also includes integrative processes conditioned not by disruption in the functioning of the integral personality system, but, on the contrary, by its subsequent recovery, reconstruction, and self-organization. The review of psychological literature on the research problem allowed us to conclude that specific theoretical approaches to the study of human destructiveness are based on authors’ implicit or explicit ideas about personality as an integral or differentiated entity. Based on the results of the study, we propose a description of the integrative and disintegrative aspects of the experience of personal destructiveness. The dominant tendency is the maintenance of integrity and stability, since the activity of experiencing is aimed at integrating the subsystems of personality in order to overcome a difficult life situation, as well as at integrating life experience.