In particular, the connection between overexcitability and twice-exceptionality (i.e., the experience of being both intellectually gifted and experiencing a disability such as ADHD or anxiety, among many others, often abbreviated as 2e) has not been explored adequately by anyone, especially as it exists in adults.  And since it’s in adults and adolescents that we see the dynamisms, the subject of overexcitability in 2e adults is a subject that is ripe for research that could have significant positive impact on many people’s lives.

At the same time, overexcitability is surely a mixed blessing. Dabrowski was clear about the inherent difficulties of living with intensity and the impact of OE on the process of positive disintegration: being overexcitable leads to struggle and conflict, both internal and external.  It is, after all, still disintegration, and even the positive kind is no walk in the park.

Piechowski’s chapter in New Voices, and his early work in general, celebrated the rich experience of life with overexcitability.  Dabrowski’s theory removed the stigma of pathology from nervousness by stressing that being highly excitable does not impair cognitive functioning.  Moreover, according to TPD, nervous people’s prognoses are especially positive when their OE is global rather than narrow—in other words, an all-encompassing aspect of their lived experience.

But Dabrowski didn’t pull the idea of OE out of thin air.  We can find overexcitability described in the psychological and medical literature at least as far back as 1899, when a Scottish physician writing in The Lancet, Thomas Clouston, described a condition that is strikingly similar to Dabrowski’s description of OE, marked by “an undue re-activeness to mental and emotional stimuli which in ordinary children would evoke only slight response” (The Lancet, 1899, p. 292).