Abstract

The author of this text introduces to Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s views on the subject of national character as a category describing the structure and character traits of individual and collective identity. The Polish psychiatrist and existential psychotherapist K. Dąbrowski distinguishes positive and negative traits of the „national character” of Poles, based on a typology of characters by Ernst Kretschmer and his own theory of psychical over-excitability types. My text verifies the introduced psychological arguments with the concept of “humanity”, finding that the concept of „national character” can be included into the complex or the ego defense mechanisms.