Psychosynthesis presupposes psychoanalysis, or, rather, includes it as a first and necessary stage.
—Roberto Assagioli
I believe psychoanalytic method and theory is a necessary substructure for any such “higher” or growth psychology.
—Abraham Maslow
Roberto Assagioli was an Italian psychiatrist who, in 1910, rejected what he felt was the psychoanalytic overemphasis on analyzing the childhood dynamics underlying psychopathology. Accordingly, he conceived “psychosynthesis,” emphasizing how the human being integrated or synthesized the many aspects of the personality into increasing wholeness. An early student of psychoanalysis, Assagioli respected and valued Freud’s views but considered them “limited” (Assagioli 1965a). Here, Assagioli, in an interview with Psychology Today, describes his relationship to early psychoanalysis:
I never met Freud personally but I corresponded with him and he wrote to Jung expressing the hope that I would further the cause of psychoanalysis in Italy. But I soon became a heretic. With Jung, I had a more cordial relationship. We met many times during the years and had delightful talks. Of all modern psychotherapists, Jung is the closest in theory and practice to psychosynthesis. (Keen 1974, 2)
As Jung would do after him, Assagioli became a psychoanalytic “heretic,” refusing to accept Freud’s reductionism and neglect of the positive dimensions of the human personality. Psychosynthesis thus became the first approach, born of psychoanalysis, which would include: the artistic, altruistic, and heroic potentials of the human being; a validation of aesthetic, spiritual, and peak experiences; the insight that psychological symptoms can be triggered by spiritual dynamics (often now called spiritual emergency); and the understanding that experiences of meaning and purpose in life derive from a healthy relationship between the personal self and a deeper or higher Self in ongoing daily living, or what is called Self-realization. These concerns were later to place psychosynthesis within the developing fields of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.
By developing psychosynthesis, Assagioli sought, then, to address not only the resolution of early childhood issues—a focus on what he called the lower unconscious—but to give attention to the sphere of aesthetic experience, creative inspiration, and higher states of consciousness—which he called the higher unconscious or superconscious. He sought to give each of these central dimensions of human experience its proper due, avoiding any reduction of one to the other.
So although extending beyond psychoanalysis, Assagioli did not intend to leave Freud’s system completely behind. In the first of his two major books, Psychosynthesis (1965a), Assagioli envisioned psychosynthesis as founded upon a psychoanalytic exploration of the lower unconscious:
We have first to penetrate courageously into the pit of our lower unconscious in order to discover the dark forces that ensnare and menace us—the “phantasms,” the ancestral or childish images that obsess or silently dominate us, the fears that paralyze us, the conflicts that waste our energies. It is possible to do this by the use of the methods of psychoanalysis. (21)
As this exploration of the unconscious proceeded—including the higher unconscious and middle unconscious as well—the individual was more free to develop a conscious relationship with a deeper or higher Self beyond the conscious personality or, in Assagioli’s words, “widening the channel of communication with the higher Self” (27).
This relationship with Self could then guide a new synthesis of the personality embracing the fruits of the prior self-exploration and, more, it could become a source of direction and meaning in a person’s life. This ongoing relationship with Self, emerging from prior exploration of the unconscious, is called Self-realization and is a fundamental principle of psychosynthesis.
For Assagioli, then, analytic work was an essential part of the personal exploration upon which the process of psychosynthesis was based. Assagioli seemed clear that both psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis were needed to work with the whole person.
Over the years, however, psychosynthesis (at least within the English-language literature) drifted away from the developments taking place in psychoanalysis and from a focus on the lower unconscious. In the words of Will Friedman, cofounder of the Psychosynthesis Institute of New York, psychosynthesis “lost touch with its psychoanalytic roots” (Friedman 1984, 31). And psychologist Frank Haronian, former vice president of the Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, warned that psychosynthesis needed “to pay more attention to the lower unconscious,” because it was overlooking “human weaknesses and limitation” (Haronian 1983, 31, 27).1
It seems that an important reason for this separation from psychoanalysis was that Assagioli and later psychosynthesis thinkers had basic philosophical differences with Freud. Assagioli’s stance was in strong conflict with, for example, Freud’s reductionistic drive theory, his contempt for spirituality and religion, and his insistence upon a disengaged attitude on the part of the analyst.
Assagioli could not include such principles in his system, because they were fundamentally at odds with his view of human nature. He saw personal selfhood, choice, and responsibility existing at a more essential level than the drives, validated the spiritual and religious dimensions of life on their own terms, and maintained that authenticity and empathic connection were central to psychotherapy. At a most basic level, Assagioli understood the human being not as an isolated individual to be observed but as a subject in continuous, active interaction with a larger relational field:
Indeed, an isolated individual is a nonexistent abstraction. In reality each individual is interwoven into an intricate network of vital, psychological and spiritual relations, involving mutual exchange and interactions with many other individuals. (Assagioli 1965b, 5)
Given these basic differences, among many others, psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis were destined to follow two very separate courses of development.
As psychosynthesis developed, it tended to focus on personal growth, self-actualization, and the higher unconscious, while having less to say about early human development or the roots of psychological disturbances. It went on to become one of the early systems within the larger movements of existential/humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology. These latter approaches too were moving beyond the Freudian focus on the lower unconscious and psychopathology in order to study what Abraham Maslow (1971) called “the farther reaches of human nature.”
Assagioli, along with the likes of C. G. Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers, was considered an important figure in the “new pathways in psychology” and “the post–Freudian revolution” (Wilson 1972) and a major early thinker in transpersonal psychology (Boorstein 1980; Scotton, Chinen, and Battista 1996).
Indeed, psychosynthesis notions such as Transpersonal Self or Higher Self, higher unconscious or superconscious, subpersonalities, identification, disidentification, and the observing self or “I” have infused the thinking of many in contemporary psychological movements. Furthermore, many of these movements also utilize traditional psychosynthesis techniques such as guided imagery, creative use of visualization, dialoguing with parts of the personality, disidentification, exploring levels of identification, and relating to an inner symbol of wisdom.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, followed its own developmental line beyond Freud, and as it happened, toward some of Assagioli’s earlier relational conceptions. As psychosynthesis before it, psychoanalysis too became part of the global paradigm shift toward viewing reality not as composed of isolated objects interacting in space but as a vast system in which all things—including the observer—are included and interrelated. From Einstein’s earthshaking insights, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, to family systems theory, the women’s movement, and nature-centered spiritualities, to the environmental agenda, the “global village,” and religious ecumenism, existence itself was being revealed as fundamentally relational.
This trend towards synthesis is already apparent and is spreading more and more; psychosynthesis is only bringing its own contribution to it.
—Roberto Assagioli
As psychoanalysis moved in this relational direction, it increasingly perceived the person not as the isolated object of Newtonian mechanics but as an interactive part of a relational system or field. The notion of the isolated individual struggling with inner drives began to yield to a concept of the person as an integral part of a larger whole. This relational stance is represented in today’s psychoanalysis by, for example, object relations theory, self psychology, and intersubjective psychology. Each of these, in its own way, attempts to focus on the interactive field, and each is a part of a major paradigm shift toward what has been called the relational model in psychoanalysis (Mitchell 1988).
It would appear, then, that the time is ripe for psychosynthesis to move toward a deeper engagement with psychoanalytic insight and, further, to include current research into early childhood development as well. This is one of the tasks that we attempt to accomplish in this book.
However, it is important to understand that this increased inclusion of a psychoanalytic perspective does not mean a blending of all the formal concepts of psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis into a unified theory, nor does it necessarily forge any sort of elaborate theoretical common ground between practitioners of these systems. Rather, there is here simply an attempt to expand and deepen Assagioli’s original conception so that it can more fully embrace the important dimensions of human experience traditionally left to depth and developmental psychologies—again, the inclusion of these dimensions seems to have been Assagioli’s original intention.
In this approach, Assagioli’s understanding of Self-realization can become the central organizing principle synthesizing three important areas in a psychology of the whole person: developmental theory, personality theory, and clinical theory. These three areas are revealed as intimately connected, illuminating and supporting Self-realization in all practical applications of psychosynthesis.
DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY
Here is elaborated a theory of human development that is not only founded upon core psychosynthesis thought but is at the same time coherent with modern psychoanalysis, intersubjective psychology, attachment theory, and current infant research. Following Assagioli’s understanding of a relationship to Self, this relationship is seen as the essential bond or connection by which the human spirit flourishes throughout the life span. The supportive holding provided by this relationship allows us to negotiate developmental stages, harmonize our personalities, and find meaning and direction in our lives. A relationship with Self is present at any and all stages of development, manifesting within significant inner and outer environments, and so Self-realization itself is not considered a particular stage of human development.
PERSONALITY THEORY
From this developmental perspective arises a theory of personality in which an intact relationship with Self is seen to allow a creative engagement with the many diverse facets of the human personality—body, feelings, mind, intuition, imagination, drives, subpersonalities, and so on. This natural multiplicity may form an inner coherence or community within the inclusive empathic field of the person who is in turn held within the empathic field of Self. The higher and lower unconscious are not here seen as naturally occurring personality structures or levels of development; rather, these sectors of the unconscious are considered the result of wounding to the relationship with Self, and are found to underlie many psychological disturbances both mild and severe, personal and transpersonal. The view here is that both the higher and lower unconscious are sectors in need of ongoing exploration and integration.
CLINICAL THEORY
If an intact empathic relationship with Self allows for the emergence of the human spirit, a coherent expression of personality, and a sense of meaning in our lives, then it follows that a disruption in this empathic connection will cause disturbances in these areas. Furthermore, if an empathic disruption causes wounding, it can only be that an empathic connection can heal this wounding. Thus a profound empathic intersubjective resonance between the psychosynthesis practitioner and client becomes the healing center of all work in psychosynthesis. The functioning of an empathic field is perhaps the most important way that Self operates in psychosynthesis practice and, again, without this empathy there can be no true healing and transformation. While the breadth of psychosynthesis allows the use of many techniques and methods from widely different approaches, these are completely secondary to this empathic resonance.
Reviewing these three areas, it is clear that psychosynthesis can be of special help to those who work with the heights and depths of human experience, with psychological difficulties and spiritual practices, and with integrating the transcendent in daily life. On the one hand, we need not avoid psychological work, believing that this is a sidetracking of our spiritual path or an ensnarement in illusion; on the other hand, we need not consider religious experience a psychological symptom nor spiritual practice a defense mechanism.
Psychosynthesis instead addresses the common experience in which psychological difficulties, interpersonal challenges, personal self-actualization, and higher states of consciousness all exist side by side in the same personality—the situation, after all, of most of us. But even more important than this, psychosynthesis seeks to recognize and support the particular life journey of the person—the individual’s own unique path of Self-realization.
We have written Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of the Spirit with several purposes in mind:
While this book elaborates on much of the traditional material found in the psychosynthesis literature since the 1970s, it also integrates some current advances in psychosynthesis thought.
Many of these newer developments are further detailed in our book The Primal Wound: A Transpersonal View of Trauma, Addiction, and Growth (1997). This current volume may be considered a companion to that work, which in turn is supported by John Firman’s earlier effort, “I” and Self: Re-Visioning Psychosynthesis (1991). Brief descriptions of the chapters follow.
Taken together, the Introduction and Chapter 1 outline a history of psychosynthesis. We describe Assagioli’s involvement with early psychoanalysis and his apostasy from it, the evolution of psychoanalysis and psychosynthesis, and the later place of psychosynthesis within humanistic and transpersonal psychology.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe and extend two of the most fundamental aspects of psychosynthesis theory—the model of the person and the stages of psychosynthesis—initially outlined in the first chapter of Assagioli’s seminal book, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques (1965a). New developments in both conceptions are elaborated.
Chapter 4 employs an extended case example to elaborate an important insight of psychosynthesis: that the normal personality can be seen to comprise different parts, or subpersonalities. We outline a view of subpersonality formation and the phases of harmonization.
Chapter 5 plumbs the depths of Assagioli’s notion of personal identity, showing that the essence of this identity is formed within a relational matrix. Topics include empathy, disidentification, dissociation, consciousness and will, and transcendence-immanence.
Chapter 6 presents a uniquely psychosynthetic developmental theory founded in Assagioli’s seminal ideas. Here psychosynthesis is shown to resonate strongly with aspects of object relations theory, self psychology, attachment theory, and modern infant research.
Chapter 7 deals with the levels of the unconscious and how they are formed by empathic misattunement from the environment. Using an adaptation of Assagioli’s original model, an understanding of different psychological disorders is suggested.
Chapter 8 closes the book with a discussion of Self-realization, the subject toward which all other chapters have pointed in different ways. Self-realization is seen as an ongoing relationship with a deeper Self over the human life span, a relationship that gives meaning and direction to human life. Here, Self-realization is understood not as a destination but as a journey.
I consider it [psychosynthesis] as a child—or at the most as an adolescent—with many aspects still incomplete; yet with a great and promising potential for growth.
—Roberto Assagioli
In sum, we can say that psychosynthesis is a system that attempts to understand both analysis and synthesis, both wounding and healing, both personal and transpersonal growth, and both abyss and peak experiencing. Again, and above all, this is a perspective that allows an empathic connection to the unique human person, no matter what the stage of healing and growth, and draws upon techniques, methods, and practices only from within this empathic understanding.