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What Is Psychosynthesis?



PSYCHOSYNTHESIS is an integrative, holistic and depth psychology that offers frameworks for working with the whole human being, including our spiritual and soulful dimensions... 


It was developed by Roberto Assagioli - a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Italy, and a student and colleague of Freud’s. However, he felt that Freud’s view of consciousness was missing a vital dimension - that of humanity’s creative and intuitive capacities. And, like another contemporary of his - Abraham Maslow - he was interested in ‘the farther reaches of human nature’ - our latent potential, rather than simply our patterns of pathology. 


What set Assagioli apart from his contemporaries was his interest in eastern mysticism and the writings of the famous theosophist Alice Bailey. The influence of these spiritual teachings is clearly present in the philosophy of psychosynthesis, which stresses the importance of the human ‘impulse towards wholeness’ and the existence of the Self - a spiritual consciousness that acts as a powerful integrating principle in every human being. 


In contrast to Freud’s assertion, "I am interested only in the basement of the human being” Assagioli once wrote: ‘Psychosynthesis is interested in the whole building. We try to build an elevator which will allow a person access to every level of his personality. After all, a building with only a basement is very limited. We want to open up the terrace where you can sun-bathe or look at the stars.’

Assagioli’s desire to create a more expansive, multidimensional model of human consciousness that includes our connection to the ‘light’, is reflected in the three layers of the egg diagram, which is crowned by the star of Self. The diagram also conveys the view (shared by other depth psychologies) that the field of consciousness is contained within the much larger field the unconscious, which is both personal and collective. 


Indeed the relationship between our individual consciousness, the collective consciousness and the field of pure consciousness that upholds and animates all of existence is, in a sense the focus of all psycho-spiritual enquiry & work, which helps us recognise our underlying connection to everything while supporting us to blossom as a unique expression of that infinite oneness.


‘Universal life itself appears to us as a struggle between multiplicity and unity - a labour and an aspiration towards union.’ (Roberto Assagioli)

From the psycho-spiritual perspective, the deepest existential experience of the human being is one of alienation from Spirit - the one indivisible field of consciousness/ love from which we all came… The process of incarnation is one of separation from this field, through which we forget our connection to it, and life is a journey of reaching back towards a state of sacred union by creating ever-expanding spheres of connection - with others, the natural world & the mysterious ‘more than’ we can’t quite touch but can intuitively feel.  


The central protagonist in this dance of connection and disconnection is the soul, which is thought of as the place where spirit and matter meet. As such, it is both the sentient part of our physical being and the unique manifestation of our spiritual identity. The soul is the experiencer and the knower - the part of you that remains constant even as the weather patterns of your thoughts and feelings constantly change, and your body re-makes itself over and over again.


Soul is the deeper governing principle in our lives, however as we make our way in the world, we develop what we call in psychosynthesis a ‘survival personality’. This is the ‘adaptive self’ - the part of us that has emerged in response to the conditions of our early life - and as such, it is an ingenious mix of compensation strategies and defence mechanisms. The survival personality helps us to survive the world we are born into, however it is not all of who we are, and if we do not discover our identity beyond it, we will feel stuck, frustrated and dissatisfied with life… haunted by an inexplicable longing for something more… 


The difficulty for most people is that they ‘over-identify’ with their survival personality and mistake it for their true identity - they get lost in their roles and their masks, and forget who they are beneath them. Central to the therapeutic application of psychosynthesis then, is the process of ‘dis-identification’, through which the client begins to recognise themself as more than their responses, mindsets and behaviour patterns and comes to understand themself as a centre of consciousness and will with the power to create and transform their life. 


Will is a central concept in psychosynthesis, and Assagioli’s writing on will is one of his greatest contributions to the field. Essentially, our will is our life-force - the psychic function that drives our expression and participation in life. Psychosynthesis proposes that as we make our way in the world, and are inevitably wounded, our will becomes captured by our survival personality, which directs it towards strategies to win love and protect us from further pain. Our life-giving, creative potential gets caught in an endless quest for control, approval and security. And this is a tragedy because it's bound to fail - what the vigilant outward gaze of the survival personality is blind to is the fact that what it seeks out there can only be cultivated from within.


Love, approval and acceptance are inside jobs and trying to find them through work or romance is a recipe for confusion, disappointment and worst of all, self-betrayal.

The will becomes free when, over an extended period of self reflection, the individual is able to observe their varied (and sometimes conflicting) motives and desires and not be consumed by them, but instead make conscious choices about where to direct their energy and attention. In psychosynthetic work, we call this ‘establishing a seat of awareness in the I’. Our I is the centre of our consciousness and the place through which we identify - ‘I am this/ I am that’... As you can see in the diagram, The I sits at the centre of the field of consciousness and is connected to the Self. This conveys the idea that the I can receive and reflect the qualities of Self. However this only becomes possible once there is sufficient coherence in the personality… 


‘The basic purpose of psychosynthesis is to release or, let us say, help to release the energies of the Self. Prior to this, the purpose is to help integrate or synthesise the individual around the personal self, and then later to affect the synthesis between the personal ego and the Self.’ (Roberto Assagioli)


And so there are two stages of synthesis - personal synthesis and transpersonal synthesis. Personal synthesis is about the integration of the personality around the unifying centre of the I. This involves freeing the will from its unconscious trappings in neurosis and defence, and creating a kind of internal coherance, with which comes a capacity to feel and express Self in the world. Indeed, as the connection to Self becomes more integrated, one’s consciousness and will are inevitably directed beyond the personal to include a sense of responsibility for the greater whole. This is transpersonal synthesis - when the individual will is aligned with the will of the Self.


So psychosynthesis is (as the name suggests) a psychology of synthesis, that offers us profound tools to integrate the multidimensional experience of being human, which includes working with both pathology and potential; both the past and the future; both our human and our spiritual identities. 

Perhaps the most radical proposition of psychosynthesis is that our desire to experience wholeness and to create meaning and value in our lives is the fundamental driving force of personal evolution. And that inherent in that journey of creating meaning is the process of unlocking the gifts and insights of the superconscious. Indeed, Assagioli believed that repression of our higher potential - of our capacity to create healing and change - leads to psychological disturbances in the same way that repressed emotion and trauma does. 


In his own words, ‘the needs for meaning, for higher values, for a spiritual life, are as real as biological or social needs.’ Which is to say that the soul’s appetite for meaning, purpose and expansion is a crucial component of psychological health. This remains the primary context in all psychosynthesis work - that within and in-spite of anything a person may have endured or be going through, there is an awakening Self that is rich with inner resource, and working with the emergent Self, and uncovering its gifts and insights, is the key to nurturing a person’s capacity to create and transform their life. 


And this is why psychosynthesis is so important and relevant today. It offers us frameworks and exercises to unlock latent creative potential and aspiration - the energies we need to co-create an emergent future that is not a competition for control, approval and security, but a place in which beauty and meaning can flourish.

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