How Mollon’s psychoanalytic lens opens a path from fragmentation toward reintegration and individuation.
The Space Between
One of the biggest challenges I face when tackling my topics is realising that I’m usually searching for answers that the everyday world doesn’t easily provide. Within the neurodiverse space—like in many other niche worlds—the information that circulates often feels recycled.
It’s a remix of trendy ideas, hot takes, and predictable calls to action, usually spiced up with a “controversial” hook just to grab engagement.
On the other side of the spectrum sits the professional class: a gatekept community that tends to treat anything outside their academic bubble as beneath them. Their information often comes packaged as a rigid, take-it-or-leave-it decree. (And let’s set aside, for now, those who dismiss entire disorders simply because it doesn’t fit their personal or theoretical preferences.)
That leaves me suspended in a strange space.
The topics I want to challenge, expand on, or simply understand rarely find an audience open to a different way of navigating the infosphere. My ODD/PDA wiring makes it nearly impossible to just churn out a straightforward “how-to.” Before you can even get to the how-to, you need to grapple with the why-to—and that never fits into a neat paragraph.
Looking Beyond the Usual Suspects
My own journey through ADHD literature reflects this tension. Yes, I read Barkley for the scientific backbone, and skimmed through Mate, Hallowell, and the rest. But there was an itch for something deeper—a perspective that wasn’t just biology dressed up in academic robes or pop-psych gloss.
That search led me to Phil Mollon’s The Disintegrating Self, which quickly became something of a touchstone. Mollon situates ADHD within psychodynamic theory, framing behaviours through unconscious patterns shaped in early development. He doesn’t replace the biological account, but rather adds nuance—shedding light on working memory difficulties through the lens of object constancy, or explaining why external accountability and validation are often essential through the idea of the externalised self-object.
I don’t claim mastery of these theories, but they offered me language for lived realities that biology alone doesn’t capture.
And yet, I’ve also watched professionals dismiss TikTok discussions of “object permanence” as nothing more than a childhood developmental stage. Technically correct, perhaps—but only if you confine yourself to a silo that ignores psychoanalytic theory.
ADHD is, by definition, a neurodevelopmental condition. But development isn’t only biological; it is also psychological. Reducing it to one domain blinds us to how these different frameworks might converge to explain why certain challenges persist into adulthood.
From Disintegration to Reintegration
Mollon’s phrase, the disintegrating self, resonated with me as more than theory. It captured the lived sensation of ADHD: the fragmentation, the constant pulling apart of focus, coherence, and even identity. Where Barkley maps the biology of executive dysfunction, Mollon offers language for what it feels like when those mechanisms collapse—not simply as lapses of attention, but as disruptions in the continuity of selfhood.
Disintegration in this sense isn’t melodrama. It’s the ordinary experience of forgetting why you walked into a room, losing the thread of a conversation, or abandoning projects half-finished—not because they lacked value, but because the scaffolding to hold them together slipped. Over time, these fragments accumulate, leaving you with a sense of discontinuity: am I the person who had the idea, or the one who let it drop?
What intrigued me most was not just Mollon’s diagnosis of fracture, but the implicit challenge of its opposite. If the self can disintegrate, surely it could also reintegrate.
This reintegration doesn’t mean forcing coherence through rigid discipline or pretending ADHD doesn’t exist. Rather, it is the slow stitching together of fragments into a whole that is flexible enough to bend but coherent enough to endure.
The Work of Reintegration
Here Jung’s language of individuation becomes useful. Jung argued that growth happens not by rejecting the shadow—the parts of ourselves we’d rather hide—but by integrating it.
In ADHD terms, this might mean not treating distractibility, impulsivity, or the need for external accountability as shameful defects, but as parts of the self that must be acknowledged and worked with. Reintegration, then, is less about “fixing” than about weaving.
This weaving happens through both external and internal means. Externally, through self-objects—people, structures, reminders, accountability partners—that anchor us. Internally, through the reframing of traits from pathologies to patterns: not excuses, but explanations that invite adaptation rather than rejection.
Mollon’s lens doesn’t replace the biological account of ADHD. It complements it. Biology explains the mechanics of disintegration; psychology explains its meaning. Together, they open the possibility that reintegration is not just a coping strategy but a deeper form of individuation: becoming whole, not by denying fragmentation, but by accepting it as part of the human fabric.
The Irony of Exclusion
And here’s where the irony returns. Reintegration requires us to see value in fragmented perspectives, yet professional spaces often exclude those very perspectives unless they are wrapped in the credentials of academia. I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome because I wasn’t “working towards a PhD,” as if lived experience and critical thinking were worthless without a title attached.
The irony?
These same professionals know full well that ADHD statistically makes academic progression—especially at doctoral level—far less accessible without significant support, even for those with high potential.
That exclusion, in its own way, is another act of disintegration. It fractures the conversation, keeping insight in silos instead of allowing it to weave together. Which is precisely why Mollon’s framing matters: if reintegration is possible, it won’t come from choosing between the trendy and the gatekept. It will come from finding the threads worth weaving, wherever they are found.
A Question for You
So I’ll leave you with this: where in your own life do you notice disintegration—those scattered, fractured pieces of self that don’t quite fit together?
And what would reintegration look like if you treated those fragments not as failures, but as threads waiting to be woven back into your whole?
