INTRODUCTION
1. While this lack of focus on a psychoanalytic or an early childhood perspective was recognized within the field (Firman 1991; Friedman 1984; Haronian 1983; Kramer 1988), it also was noted outside of the field. According to respected transpersonal researcher and thinker Stanislav Grof,
While I share Assagioli’s emphasis on the creative, superconscious, and radiant potential of the psyche, it has been my experience that direct confrontation of its dark side whenever it manifests itself in the process of self-exploration is beneficial. (1985, 194)
It is important to emphasize that these critiques focus on psychosynthesis as a system and not necessarily on the work of individual practitioners. Practitioners often understand early childhood dynamics, but in addressing these they have needed to draw upon theories other than psychosynthesis.
2. Of course, an exhaustive exploration of all these topics is beyond the scope of any single volume. For further study, we refer the reader to the writings of Assagioli and to the growing body of psychosynthesis literature.
CHAPTER 1
1. Assagioli’s laissez-faire attitude toward the organizational development of psychosynthesis created both benefits and problems. As with anything with no central organization, psychosynthesis was free to take on a wide variety of different forms and applications—a healthy diversity producing some very innovative and creative developments.
On the other hand, the lack of a widely accepted training curriculum and quality control created a diffusion of psychosynthesis that may have hindered its acceptance in both the public and professional communities. Practitioners with widely divergent levels of skills and training could present themselves as psychosynthesists, creating confusion and misunderstandings about the field. Furthermore, no structure—such as an international training school—could emerge to sustain the kind of research, theoretical development, clinical work, and publishing necessary for a coherent, far-reaching impact on the field of psychology.
2. Most of the information in the following section has been drawn from the accounts in Roberto Assagioli (1965a), Eugene Smith (1974), Jean Hardy (1987), and Allesandro Berti (1988).
CHAPTER 2
1. Assagioli (1967) attempted to make a strong distinction between what he considered regressive and progressive elements in the collective unconscious by employing his notions of higher unconscious and lower unconscious. Although he did not ever seem to explicitly use the terms higher collective unconscious and lower collective unconscious, we consider these useful concepts and thus the horizontal lines in Figure 2.1 move beyond the individual psyche into the collective. This depiction of a higher and lower collective was first rendered by Vargiu (1974a) in the first issue of the journal, Synthesis, an issue heartily welcomed by Assagioli not long before his death.
In our view, the higher collective unconscious and lower collective unconscious are the result of past primal wounding and splitting in our collective psyche. Therefore our call to heal as a species, as our call to heal as individuals, could involve an engagement with either realm, and would generally tend toward an integration of both. This integration would occur alongside the natural unfoldment and expression of collective human potential at the level of the middle collective unconscious.
2. This active process of inner structuralization or organization implies a self who is doing the organization. Even during these earliest months of life, there is a self (what we shall call “I”) who is experiencing this process of emergent organization, or what infant researcher Daniel Stern (1985) has called “a sense of emergent self.” According to Stern, modern infant research has demonstrated that the infant is not, as is often understood in psychoanalytic circles, lost in an undifferentiated state of primary narcissism. Rather, the infant is actively engaged in meaningful and reality-based interaction with the environment.
3. Assagioli differentiated between the area of the unconscious that was already structuralized, called the structured unconscious, and the area of the unconscious that was still available for structuralization, called the plastic unconscious (1965a, 1973a).
4. Laura’s story is based on an actual case, but it has been highly disguised in order to guard the identity of the client. All of the cases and examples presented throughout this book are disguised as well: the client’s name is not the true name; the gender of the client and therapist may or may not be correct; there are elements of cases that have been borrowed from other cases (again, in disguised forms); and quoted dialogues are paraphrases of the originals. All of these cases represent authentic patterns of psychosynthesis therapy while providing anonymity for therapist and client.
5. Although Assagioli never directly addressed the formation of the higher and lower unconscious, he presented these two sectors within the context of the psychoanalytic understanding of the formation of the unconscious by repression (Assagioli 1965a, 12). He also thought of the higher and lower unconscious as being similar in structure and dynamics, although different in quality of content:
At this point it is necessary to remember that while there is a difference of quality, the superconscious shares some of the other characteristics of the whole unconscious. The superconscious is only a section of the general unconscious, but which has some added qualities that are specific. On the whole it partakes of the nature of the unconscious and the general possible relationships between the unconscious and the personal consciousness. (1965a, 198)
In our work we have gone on to recognize the primal wounding and splitting that underlie the repression involved in the formation of these levels of the unconscious. We have not found useful the earlier psychosynthesis notion that the higher unconscious represents future stages of growth, while the lower unconscious contains past stages (see Note 9 in this chapter).
6. In Jungian terms, we might say that there is always a negative and positive shadow—negative and positive material repressed in the formation of the conscious persona. Jung (1959, 8, 266) himself admits the possibility of a positive shadow and not simply a negative one, but psychosynthesis goes further to claim that this polarity of the shadow is the norm.
7. For an overview of “I” as understood in psychology and religion, see the appendices “I in Religion” and “I in Psychology,” in Firman 1991.
8. Some earlier theory in psychosynthesis interposed a “Higher Self” or “Transpersonal Self” between “I” and what was called, “Universal Self” (see Assagioli 1973a). Here it was implied that if we could identify with this Higher Self, we could find communion with Universal Self.
This formulation appears to be an attempt to explain that our usual experience of ourselves, masked by identifications, needs to expand beyond those limitations for us to realize our deeper, essential nature in communion with the Divine, Spirit or, in our terms, “Self,” who can be experienced as universal (see “Self As Universal” in Chapter 8).
However, the problem with this early formulation of Higher or Transpersonal Self is that there is in fact no “other self” we become: we remain “I” throughout all changes in consciousness, even though the limited experience of ourselves can transform radically as we grow psychologically and spiritually. So to characterize this transformation as “becoming another self,” although this poetically captures the profundity of the experience, is finally inaccurate and misleading. What actually has occurred in this transformation is that we have realized who we were all along: “I” in communion with Self, our individuality in communion with universality.
The problem with believing that we must become “another self” in this process makes that “other self” seem like an object that we can pursue, an “other” with whom we can identify, which has the effect of obscuring the truth that we are always and for evermore “I.” We may consequently begin looking for “I” in all the wrong places.
So for us there is no “Higher Self” or “Transpersonal Self” understood in this way. Rather, we posit that over the course of Self-realization, human beings can find themselves in communion with Self, often experienced as universal, expressing their unique, essential “I-amness” in the world—the expression we term authentic personality (see later discussion). For a more detailed study of this issue of Higher Self, see the appendix “Individuality and Universality” in Firman 1991.
9. Depicting Self at the apex of the higher unconscious also can give the impression that psychospiritual development proceeds from the lower unconscious (“the past”) to the higher unconscious (“the future”), when in fact these two areas comprise highly charged structures that have been split off and repressed due to wounding, for example, structures such as the negative personality and negative unifying center and the positive personality and positive unifying center (Firman and Gila 1997). (See also Notes 2, 7, and 8 in Chapter 7.) In our view, the higher unconscious and the lower unconscious are not developmental levels but dissociated sectors of the psyche that need to be integrated.
Note that although higher unconscious experience often feels “unitive,” it actually excludes the lower unconscious. It is not the higher unconscious that includes the wholeness of the person, but rather the middle unconscious as it grows to integrate the material from both the heights and the depths (see Chapter 8).
Beyond this, however, Self-realization also should be distinguished from psychospiritual development itself. Self-realization, as we understand it, is not a developmental achievement but an ongoing relationship with Self throughout all of the day-to-day activities of life—it is not a destination but a journey. True, this journey often will involve the psychospiritual transformation of the person, but this is not so much a goal as it is the by-product of living out a faithfulness to one’s deepest callings. We believe that the spiritual leaders of the ages are not so by virtue of their higher consciousness principally but by fidelity to their vocations.
CHAPTER 3
1. Developmental theories that posit an infantile primary fused state from which we individuate (e.g., Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975; Wilber 1977), for example, might sound vaguely similar to Assagioli’s stages. The problems with such theories have been discussed else-where (Firman and Gila 1997; Stern 1985), but in any case, the stages of psychosynthesis are not to be confused with them.
2. Note that the “defense” of defense mechanisms and structures is not primarily against unacceptable desires, fantasies, or wishes, as traditionally held, but more fundamentally against primal wounding—something that should be defended against. Thus in psychosynthesis, such defenses might aptly be termed survival mechanisms and can be treated with care and respect by the practitioner, recognizing the actual trauma and true danger to which they are a creative response. Without such a sensibility, attempts may be made to “break down defenses” or “break through resistances,” tactics that may appear to force new behaviors. However, these new behaviors may, because the primal wounding remains repressed, be simply more sophisticated forms of survival personality.
3. For a description of a workshop based on this approach to addictions, see “An Addiction/Abuse Workshop,” in Firman and Gila 1997.
4. Our conception of the collective unconscious here is not the strict concept of species-wide archetypal patterns, but what Jung (1960) termed the collective consciousness, which is, in the words of Jungian Jolande Jacobi, “the sum total of traditions, conventions, customs, prejudices, rules, and norms of the environment in which the individual lives, and the spirit of the age by which he is influenced” (1967, 150–51).
We nevertheless consider such influences as a sector of the collective unconscious, because they are collective influences that can and often do affect us unconsciously. However, this is a sector of the collective that is not species wide but comprises patterns that come to us from smaller collectivities or communities (e.g., family of origin, culture, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion). These might be represented as concentric ovals around the oval diagram in Figure 2.1. For example, psychosynthesis thinker Margret Rueffler (1995a, 1995b) recognizes several different subsectors within the collective, including the familial, the ancestral, and the cultural national. One interesting thing about this level of collectivity is that individuals and groups can alter the patterns operating here.
CHAPTER 4
1. Chris Meriam, writing about early work in subpersonality theory, says:
Somewhere around 1970, Assagioli expressed this concept to psychosynthesis theorist James Vargiu (from a transcribed conversation, courtesy of Ann [Gila] Russell). In the same conversation, Assagioli also said that subpersonality theory could be a potential bridge of his work to that of Freud, Jung, and Reich, via their concepts of “complexes,” as well as a point of contact with behaviorism, in that subpersonalities are strongly conditioned by the environment. Vargiu subsequently wrote the first substantial article on subpersonality theory (ibid.), drawing heavily on the work of psychosynthesis theorists Steven Kull and Betsie Carter-Haar at the Psychosynthesis Institute in Palo Alto. (1994, 8–9)
2. This understanding of the creation of subpersonalities differs from earlier formulations in psychosynthesis. For James Vargiu, a subpersonality develops from “an inner drive, or urge, which strives to be expressed, to be realized” (1974b, 60). On the other hand, Piero Ferrucci writes that subpersonalities “are degradations or distortions of timeless qualities existing in the higher levels of the psyche” (1982, 55).
We are positing, rather, that the fundamental developmental axis of a subpersonality is a relationship to what we are calling a unifying center. It is through such a relationship that diverse psyche-soma contents are synthesized into a subpersonality, and these include not only drives and transpersonal qualities but many other elements as well, such as learned skills, inborn gifts, affects, beliefs, attitudes, and values.
3. The influence of the higher and lower unconscious upon subpersonality formation has been explored well by Chris Meriam (1994).
4. This ability to disidentify from one level of organization in order to engage a higher level of organization has been recognized by Robert Kegan (1982) and Ken Wilber (2000) as a key dynamic in negotiating stages of human development.
5. In Arthur Koestler’s (1978) terms, a subpersonality is a type of holon, an entity that is both a part of a whole and a whole itself. Holons are found at every level of organization: atoms organized as molecules, molecules organized as cells, cells organized as organs, and organs organized as an organism. We might say that subpersonalities are organs that help make up the organism of the personality.
CHAPTER 5
1. Psychologist and meditator Jack Engler, pointing to this absolute subjectivity of “I” as revealed in Theravada meditation says:
My sense of being an independent observer disappears. The normal sense that I am a fixed, continuous point of observation from which I regard now this object, now that, is dispelled.
In each moment, there is simply a process of knowing (nama) and its object (rupa). Each arises separately and simultaneously in each moment of awareness. No enduring or substantial entity or observer or experiencer or agent—no self—can be found behind or apart from these moment-to-moment events to which they could be attibuted (an-atta = no-self). (in Wilber 1977, 41)
One can experience these states of no-self, because “I” is distinct from any “sense of being an independent observer” and, indeed, cannot be found behind the experience, cannot be captured as an object at all (even as a “self-representation”).
As we shall see shortly, Assagioli would add this to Engler’s account: “I” cannot only be aware in this way but can will also. Indeed, meditation is only possible via an act of will, choosing to gently focus awareness and not be caught up in the objects of awareness.
2. In a way, too, it might be said that even Ellen’s survival personality is not seen per se, but that she is simply relegated to passive invisibility by the family system. But here “being seen” as this survival personality means that she is invisible within the system, not that she is in any way a focus of attention by the system.
3. Such an identification, arising after a strong transpersonal experience, gnosis, or enlightenment, has been called positive inflation by Jung (1966) and has been discussed by R. C. Zaehner (1972) as a phenomenon in a variety of traditions. Here Zaehner quotes the Zen master, Harada Roshi (from Kapleau 1966),
An ancient Zen saying has it that to become attached to one’s own enlightenment is as much a sickness as to exhibit a maddeningly active ego. Indeed, the profounder the enlightenment, the worse the illness.
My own sickness lasted almost ten years. (98, emphasis added)
See also Rosenthal (1987) who maintains that such inflation seems to be a natural stage of spiritual growth through which many people pass.
4. The mysterious nature of “I” has been approached in the experimental laboratory as well. After years of research into human biofeedback, Alyce and Elmer Green wrote:
What can be said as we work with these levels is: We are not merely what society says we are, as children, as adults, or as old people. That is the first level of field-independence: independence from what we perceive outside the skin. Further, we are not merely what our bodies say we are, not in the voluntary nervous system or in the involuntary nervous system. Not only are we not our emotions ..., but we are also not our thoughts. The question remains, then: Who are we? (1977, 193)
5. These two stances, one ignoring transcendence and the other ignoring immanence, are examples of what Firman (1974; Firman and Gila 1997) has called, respectively, morphilia (or morphophilia, i.e., “love of form”) and morphobia (or morphophobia, i.e., “fear of form”). Morphilia involves a reduction of the human being to form, to manifest expression, to the psyche-soma; morphobia involves a reduction of the human being to discarnate spirit or emptiness, whose supposed “true nature” is unmanifest, solely transcendent. These are the two sides of what Wilber calls the “ultimate pathology,” or “a failure to integrate the manifest and unmanifest realms” (Wilber, Engler, and Brown 1986, 144). In our terms here, this is a failure to recognize transcendence-immanence.
Assagioli’s (1965a) early formulation of a disidentification exercise, “I am not my body, I am not my feelings, I am not my mind,” can in some instances support a morphobic position: the belief that human beings are essentially pure spirits to whom the world is unimportant, foreign, or even a prison. This disidentification exercise has been critiqued elsewhere (Firman 1991; O’Regan 1984).
6. This blossoming of freedom that comes with disidentification can be seen clearly in the words of psychiatrist Arthur Deikman:
By dis-identifying with automatic sequences we lessen their impact and provide free space in which to choose an appropriate response. Thus, we achieve autonomy where previously we were overwhelmed and helpless. (1982, 108)
7. Our ability to engage complete helplessness, to, in effect, “die to self,” points to a profound truth about the nature of human spirit—“I” can experience the complete loss of any sense of existing at all. “I” is not something we can have, or hold, or experience. “I” is pure subject, never an object. “I” is distinct but not separate from any experience that affirms either “I exist” or “I do not exist.”
You are “I” before, during, and after any experiences of no-thingness and somethingness, of union and disintegration, of self and no-self. You are transcendent-immanent within any and all experiences, no matter what they are; you are not any particular experience, but the one who experiences.
CHAPTER 6
1. Exceptions to this would be developmental models that do not recognize the conscious and volitional selfhood—the “I-amness”—of infants and children. For example, we do not subscribe to the psychoanalytic idea that infancy is characterized by “primary narcissism,” “autism,” “symbiosis,” or “self-other merger”—notions that imply that the infant is lost in some sort of fused, insular, undifferentiated, nonreality-based state. As researcher Daniel Stern reports:
Infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation. There is no confusion between self and other in the beginning or at any point during infancy. They are also predesigned to be selectively responsive to external social events and never experience an autistic-like phase. (10)
This understanding of early development is crucial in connecting empathically not only with infants and children but with those deeper layers within ourselves. Without this empathy, we are prone to the neglect and even abuse of both “outer children” and “inner children.”
This notion of self-other fusion in infancy also can lead to a pathologizing of childhood: psychological disorders can be seen as simple fixations at, or regressions to, various supposedly normal stages of development—psychotic at the supposed early stages of self-other fusion, borderline and narcissism at a slightly more differentiated later stage, and neurosis at a still later stage. Thus the clinician is led to ideas of the client as someone who simply has not grown up, as being infantile and immature, rather than as having developed compensating structures to manage the violations of primal wounding. Here the specific woundings of the unique individual can be completely overlooked in a focus on supposed developmental issues.
Margaret Mahler (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975) herself, who posits an infantile, undifferentiated state, recognizes the problem of pathologizing childhood. In a communication with Stern, she suggested that, for example, “normal autism” might be changed to “awakening” (Stern 1985, 234–35). For a further discussion of this topic, see Bowlby (1988) and Firman and Gila (1997).
2. One theory of what we are calling external unifying centers can be found in the work of transpersonal psychologist Dwight Judy (1991) who, following Baker Brownell, outlines these four types: the phyletic community, the nature community, the mystic community, and the neighborhood, political, and geographic communities.
Another scheme of unifying centers was developed within attachment theory which recognized a number of different affectional bonds operating in human development: the attachment bond, the parent’s complementary caregiving bond, the sexual pair bond, the sibling/kinship bond, and the friendship bond (cited in Cassidy and Shaver 1999, 46). See also Bowlby’s (1969) concept of behavioral systems.
Also, Robert Kegan (1982) outlined what he called cultures of embeddedness operating as holding environments—our unifying centers—for different stages of individual development: the mothering culture, parenting culture, role recognizing culture, culture of mutuality, culture of identity or self-authorship, and culture of intimacy.
Finally, Alice Miller’s (2001) helping witness and enlightened witness are very much what we would call authentic unifying centers, and Heinz Kohut’s (1977, 1971, 1984) concept of selfobject is quite akin to our notion of a unifying center.
3. What we recognize as the primal wound also can be seen in aspects of Michael Balint’s discussion of the basic fault (Balint 1968); Erich Neumann’s notion of a break in the child’s “primal relationship” with the mother/Self, which then causes “a headlong fall into the forsakenness and fear of the bottomless void” (Neumann 1973, 75); Ludwig Binswanger’s insight that a break between self and world leads to “the delivery of the existence to nothingness” (in May, Angel, and Ellenberger 1958, 48); John Bowlby’s study of disrupted bonds between the child and caregiver (Bowlby 1980); Abraham Maslow’s “primal, terrifying danger” created by parents not meeting the child’s fundamental needs and causing the growth of a “pseudo-self” (Maslow 1962); Michael Washburn’s “wound that exposes the ego to a terrifying ‘black hole’ at the seat of the soul” (Washburn 1994, 26); Thomas Yeomans’ notion of the soul wound (Yeo-mans 1999); Mark Epstein’s “gnawing sense of emptiness” caused by parental neglect (Epstein 1995); and John Welwood’s “core wound” caused by “the disconnection from our own being” (Welwood 2000). See also our further discussion of the primal wound (Firman and Gila 1997).
4. This type of emotional incest has been addressed by Patricia Love (1990) and Kenneth Adams (1991).
5. Again, Figure 6.9 is a random selection of addictions, as are the particular experiences underlying each addiction. We are not claiming, for example, that abandonment underlies all relationship addiction, nor that powerlessness invariably underlies alcoholism.
6. As well as “hitting bottom,” we also may “hit top,” as described in Chapter 3, with an emergence of higher unconscious material. However, even when this is the case, the survival personality is de-integrated by the emerging material, revealing the primal wounding holding the survival personality in place. Thus even in hitting top, we engage the earlier primal wounding.
7. This emergence of wounds in intimate relationships is an important dynamic in psychotherapy, affecting both therapist and client. The interplay between transference and countertransference in psychosynthesis therapy is discussed at some length elsewhere (Firman and Gila 1997).
8. For a psychosynthesis appreciation of the much-needed work in healing our relationship with nature, see Reflections on Ecopsychosynthesis (Firman and Klugman 1999).
CHAPTER 7
1. Although this description of splitting sounds like a conscious intellectual process, the actual experience may be quite automatic and may involve no conscious thought or volition at all.
2. This structuralization involves the formation of a negative personality (wounded victim, underdog, “bad ego”) relating to a negative unifying center (shaming critic, inner perpetrator, “bad object”) in the lower unconscious and a positive personality (idealized, inflated sense of self, “idealized ego”) relating to a positive unifying center (idealized spiritual source, “idealized object”) in the higher unconscious.
In our view, these “split object relations” form the higher and lower sectors of the unconscious. During empathic failure, the child cannot hold both the positive and negative aspects of the relationship, because the nonempathic environment cannot mirror these, and there often is no other unifying center present that can mirror them; the child is thus left with two impossibly contradictory experiences—being and non-being—which therefore must be split off and repressed. For a more detailed discussion of splitting, repression, and the structures involved, see Firman and Gila (1997) and Meriam (1994).
3. Of course, phenomenologically personal annihilation cannot in fact be experienced. The reason for this is simply that in a true nonbeing state, there would be no experiencing subject present at all—no one is there to have the experience. By definition, then, such a state in pure form lies forever beyond experience. Personal nonexistence is unimaginable, unthinkable, and terrifying at a level beyond the reach of consciousness. No, this is not the spiritual experience of “no-self” or “self-emptying,” described in different religious traditions.
4. Washburn (1994) appreciates the profundity, the experienced cosmic nature, of splitting. He posits a splitting of the archetypal, numinous, and magical Great Mother into a Good Mother and Terrible Mother, even writing that this is ultimately due to “fear of object loss, anxiety of losing the primary caregiver” (56)—what we would call the threat of nonbeing caused by primal wounding. We differ with Washburn’s view, in that he sees this splitting as a result of ambivalence within the child, while we see it as an effect of empathic failure in the environment.
5. Again, see Bowlby (1980) for a further understanding of the unconscious, not only as a repression of past experience but as a brokenness of current experiential range (what is called “perceptual blocking”).
6. Of course, much more research is needed into the etiology of psychopathology, although given the often-noted societal propensity to overlook the role of early trauma (see Herman 1992; Miller 2001; Van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth 1996), it is important that research should continue to include this area, even within any predominately biological agendas. For example, according to Alice Miller,
In recent years, neurobiologists have further established that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to 30 percent of those areas of the brain that control emotions. The explanation is that severe traumas inflicted on infants lead to an increase in the release of stress hormones that destroy the newly formed neurons and their interconnections.
In the scientific literature there is still next to no discussion of the implications of these discoveries for our understanding of child development and the delayed consequences of traumas and neglect. But this research confirms what I described almost twenty years ago. (2001, 15)
For research into the effects of trauma (including biological effects), see the work of Van der Kolk (1987) and Van der Kolk et al. (1996); for research into psychopathology from an attachment theory viewpoint, see Cassidy and Shaver (1999); and for clinical views of wounding underlying psychological disturbances, see the work of Miller (1981, 1984a, 1984b, 1991, 2001), Herman (1992), Herman and Hirschman (2000), Higgins (1994), Whitfield (1991, 1995), and Terr (1990, 1994).
7. This type of idealized survival personality is based on what we have called the positive personality and the positive unifying center, both idealized structures of the higher unconscious (see Note 2 in this chapter).
8. This internalized perpetrator is what we call the negative unifying center, and it amounts to the distilled essence of the nonempathic unifying centers in our lives. The depressive survival personality that is based on a relationship to this negative center is called the negative personality (see Note 2 in this chapter).
9. The first-person accounts of people with bipolar disorder make it clear that mania involves flights into the higher unconscious. Such accounts often are indistinguishable from accounts of peak and unitive experiences, and they frequently are valued as such by the person involved. Some firsthand accounts of mania follow:
It [mania] is actually a sense of communion, in the first place with God, and in the second place with all mankind, indeed with all creation.
The ordinary beauties of nature, particularly, I remember, the skies at sunrise and sunset, took on a transcendental loveliness beyond belief. (Kaplan 1964, 47, 51)
At the time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness.
When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. (Jamison 1995, 36–37, 67)
10. This type of violent survival personality is based on the lower unconscious structure that we have called the negative unifying center and is “a way of basing a sense of self upon the inner perpetrator rather than the inner victim” (Firman and Gila 1997, 166). (See Note 2 in this chapter.)
Similarly, the brilliant criminologist, Lonnie Athens (1992, 1997), who studied violent offenders, empathically posits that the violent person makes violent choices in dialogue with an internal phantom community that supports violence as a response to life. Athens’ concept of phantom community—an advance from George Herbert Mead’s generalized other—is quite similar to the notion of unifying center. See Richard Rhodes’ (1999) lucid exposition of Athens’ work.
11. According to Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood (1987):
In a desperate attempt to maintain psychological integrity, the psychotic person elaborates delusional ideas that symbolically concretize the experience whose subjective reality has begun to crumble. (133)
Psychotic delusion formation thus represents a concretizing effort to substantialize and preserve a reality that has begun to disintegrate, rather than a turning away from reality, as has been traditionally assumed (Freud 1911, 1924). (134)
. . . essential to the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients is that the therapist strive to comprehend the core of the subjective truth symbolically encoded in the patient’s delusional ideas, and to communicate this understanding in a form that the patient can use. (134)
12. This perspective can be found in the work of R. D. Laing (1965, 1967) and John Perry (1953, 1974, 1976), who both worked with the psychotic process as a creative renewal, a death and rebirth, and a transformative transition toward a more authentic way of being. More recently, some of such experiences might be viewed as a type of spiritual emergency (see Grof and Grof 1989).
13. We therefore agree with Harvard psychologist Gina O’Connell Higgins when she writes: “Because posttraumatic stress disorder accurately—albeit implicitly—emphasizes the hammer blows that create so much psychological disruption, I yearn to see some version of this diagnosis as the overarching rubric under which most other disorders are subordinated” (1994, 13).
Psychiatrist Charles Whitfield is quite in agreement with Higgins. He says that co-dependence, caused by early wounding, can be viewed “as a general and pervasive part of the painful side of the human condition such that it is itself a category under which many, if not most, conditions can be subsumed” (1991, 83).
In agreement with these views, we posit that many psychological disorders seem to be attempts to manage and survive primal wounding. Again worthy of research are the genetic and biochemical factors that may be associated with psychological disorders as well.
14. For more on this empathic approach within psychosynthesis, see Meriam (1996) and Firman and Gila (1997), and for a look at empathic work with more serious psychological disturbances, see the intersubjective work of Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood (1992, 1994, 1987). The reader who is interested in the empathic approach also is referred to the fine comprehensive collection of articles, Empathy Reconsidered (Bohart and Greenberg 1997).
CHAPTER 8
1. This view argues against a monism that would hold that individuality is an illusion, an illusion that must be dispelled by merging ourselves with universality. Here Assagioli quotes Lama Govinda, with whom he agrees on this point:
Individuality is not only the necessary and complementary opposite of universality, but the focal point through which alone universality can be experienced. The suppression of individuality, the philosophical or religious denial of its value or importance, can only lead to a state of complete indifference and dissolution, which may be a liberation from suffering but a purely negative one, as it deprives us of the highest experience towards which the process of individuation seems to aim: the experience of perfect enlightenment, of Buddhahood, in which the universality of our true being is realized.
Merely to “merge into the whole” like the “drop into the sea,” without having realized that wholeness, is only a poetical way of accepting annihilation and evading the problem that the fact of our individuality poses. Why should the universe evolve individualized forms of life and consciousness if this were not consistent with or inherent in the very spirit or nature of the universe? (1973a, 128)
Assagioli also quotes Radhakrishnan on this same issue:
The peculiar privilege of the human self is that he [sic] can consciously join and work for the whole and embody in his own life the purpose of the whole. . . . The two elements of selfhood: uniqueness (each-ness), and universality (all-ness), grow together until at last the most unique becomes the most universal. (1973a, 128)
2. In some extreme instances this infatuation can lead to what Assagioli called a confusion of levels: “The distinction between absolute and relative truths, between the Self and the ‘I,’ is blurred and the inflowing spiritual energies may have the unfortunate effect of feeding and inflating the personal ego” (1965a, 44). Assagioli continues:
The fatal error of all who fall victim to these illusions is to attribute to their personal ego or “self” the qualities and powers of the Self. In philosophical terms, it is a case of confusion between an absolute and a relative truth, between the metaphysical and the empirical levels of reality; in religious terms, between God and the “soul.”
. . . instances of such confusion, more or less pronounced, are not uncommon among people dazzled by contact with truths which are too powerful for their mental capacities to grasp and assimilate. The reader will doubtless be able to record instances of similar self-deception which are found in a number of fanatical followers of various cults. (45)
The dangers of this type of identification with the higher unconscious have been recognized by many writers. Jung (1966) called this “positive inflation,” Miller (1981) wrote of “grandiosity” as a defense against depression, Rosenthal (1987) utilized the phrase “inflated by the spirit,” and Bogart (1995) warned against “the shadow of vocation.” More recently Lifton (2000) has recognized this type of dynamic in his concept of “functional megalomania” which fuels what he calls “the new global terrorism.”
This type of extreme, fanatical identification is based on true higher unconscious energies, but these have been incorporated by the survival personality as a defense against the wounding in the lower unconscious. In psychosynthesis terms this places one deeply into Stage Zero, the survival stage, and a crisis of transformation is needed to lead toward the subsequent stages of exploration, the emergence of “I,” and authentic contact with, and response to, Self. Indeed, authentic call here might be to engage just such a crisis.
3. This graph is based on that originated by James Vargiu (see Firman and Vargiu 1977, 1980) and subsequently elaborated on by Firman and Gila (1997).
4. Transpersonal thinker Greg Bogart, writing in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, claims that the study of callings offers a new foundation for transpersonal psychology:
Eventually, I believe, a new foundation for transpersonal psychology may be found, not in the principle of transcendence (Washburn 1990; Wilber 1990), but in the elucidation of the process by which an individual discerns the image of that dharma or life task through which one may fulfill—in an individually appropriate manner—one’s place in the universal order. (1994, 31)
5. For example, see the series edited by Weiser and Yeomans (1984, 1985, 1988), who include psychosynthesis applications in areas such as psychotherapy, self-care, education, health, religion, organizational development, and world order.