At 16, having falsified his age, he gained access to the newly opened University of Lublin, where he attended the Polish language programme.

He next moved on to the University of Geneva where he worked with Édouard Claparède 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.

From 1932 Dąbrowski spent about two years in Vienna undergoing an abbreviated psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Stekel, a former collaborator of Sigmund Freud.

In 1937 when he returned to Poland he opened an Institute for Mental Hygiene inspired by the movement in the USA and offered courses in the field.

However the Stalinist authorities closed down his Institute of Mental Hygiene that year on the grounds that it was the product of dangerous Western ideology.

With a partial thaw in Soviet-Western relations, in 1964 he travelled to Canada with his family on a one year visiting professorship at the University of Alberta.

The resulting shift, if there is one, may be regarded as positive when the process has moved the personality to an increased capacity to contain such experiences and gain new perspectives.

He established a rehabilitation centre in Zagórze (near Warsaw) for patients who suffered mental disorders after experiencing difficult life situations.

Dąbrowski found that every one of the children displayed what he called his factor of overexcitability, OE, "which constituted the foundation for the emergence of neurotic and psychoneurotic sets.

Dąbrowski's posited association between OE and "giftedness" appears to be supported in other research, conducted primarily by Michael Piechowski and his colleagues.