We have not found it necessary to look almost pedantically into every little corner of the unconscious.
—Roberto Assagioli
Assagioli called this stage “thorough knowledge of one's personality” and included both the lower unconscious and higher unconscious in it. But this does not mean that one sets out to make an exhaustive exploration of the heights of transpersonal experience or the depths of all primal wounding. Rather, it is necessary to begin therapy with “the consolidation of the conscious personality, and, moreover, with the establishing of the positive rapport between the therapist and the patient” (Assagioli 2000, 88). That is, what is foreground is not the exploration of the personality, even in this stage, but the person and the relationship with the therapist.
It is from this empathic communion that exploration will naturally arise, following its own timing and direction. Assagioli called this approach fractional analysis by which “the exploration of the unconscious is carried out ‘by installments’” (98). The exploration stage can extend to a vast array of different areas, from uncovering intergenerational history and patterns; to discovering wounding beneath chronic patterns; to realizing gifts of creativity and wisdom long locked away; to encountering subpersonalities; to facing major addictions.1
Again, let us emphasize that all of this will be naturally emergent within the field of spiritual empathy shared by the therapist and client. This is not the pursuit of a planned program dedicated to making “the unconscious conscious.” This is a staying with the client and the client's will, so that the surfacing and integration of various areas of the personality occur according to the client's path of Self-realization. Allow us once again to adopt a first-person omniscient approach to this stage.
What do I want to do here? I don't know. What do you do in therapy? What should I want? You say it's really about me? You really want to know what I want? Really? I want my girlfriend back, that's what I really, really want, if you must know. It's embarrassing, actually, but there it is. Hey, I'm just a romantic, a lover, what can I say?
What makes it embarrassing? Because I know she's no good for me, my friends know she's no good for me, even you probably think she's no good for me. I must be a fool. A fool for love, though. So I am a little nervous bringing this to you. Maybe you'll just roll your eyes and try to talk me out of it, like my friends; they can't stand to see me suffer either. But it's my session, my time, my money, right? I hope you don't think it's your job to manage my life.
I did seriously ask you straight out if you approved, and I liked your answer. You said you worried about this, given the pain she's caused me, but you also got how important it was to me and didn't see how I could not explore something so strong in me. You didn't even use the word “compulsive” once. That's good, because I'm in love, and you'd better get that. It's not your job to debunk my love.
So I felt you were with me in my wish and we got on with it. You asked what it would be like to win her back. That was exciting to me, to be allowed to feel what it was I was truly seeking here. I hadn't done that. I'd been too focused on getting her back. I told you how wonderful it would be. I could just feel myself in her embrace. I felt at peace, like everything was right with the world.
Yeah, then it reminded me of Jessie, my first love in high school. That was a tremendous time. Changed my life. Before her I was miserable, doing bad in school, getting in trouble. But she showed me something else. Her love made me a new man. I owed Jessie all I had. And then she dumped me.
As I was feeling all that love for Jessie again in the session, I began to feel rotten. I felt our breakup all over again, that fall back into misery. My life being over. Suicidal. I just felt so bad, depressed, lonely. Ugh. I allowed all these feelings. I remember you were with me here, not trying to do anything to me. I felt your presence telling me it was okay to allow all this, that it would be all right to let it do what it would do without feeling I needed to manage it or change it.
Then after awhile I could tell you about it. I'd never told anyone, really, hadn't even thought about it in years, and it felt so good for it to come out. I guess I hadn't felt all that at the time, and for sure there was no one for me to talk to then. And that opened the door to my misery from childhood. The misery Jessie saved me from. Or at least gave me a reprieve. Talking about getting my latest girlfriend back didn't seem like such a big deal at that point. I was more interested in this.
I forget how long it took or what the steps were, but now you know I've worked with a lot of that early abuse. At home, the bullying at school. And funny thing, as I've done that I've been able to feel the love I felt for Jessie inside me. It's my love, after all!
And my girlfriend? We'll see. I'm still interested in her, but I don't feel as desperate. And I'm real aware of when she disrespects me—I know that experience now, now I know my wounded part. She is struggling with herself now, looking at the ways she is mean or critical of me. Seems like knowing and respecting each other's soft places is a part of love too.
When he came up with his wish to try to get his girlfriend back, that was a challenge for me. Part of me had been relieved that he'd broken up with her and didn't want to see him back with her. She just seemed so mean to him, even abusive. He seemed addicted to her, almost like an emotionally battered spouse. And him talking about it as love and romance made me wince at times. How can I somehow get him to move in a healthier direction? Maybe I should persuade him … get him to see … make him realize …
Yes, I know, I know. Not my job. That's all my stuff, my world encroaching. Drop it. He's heard it all before, anyway. “Enter his world.” So I became curious about him and where he wanted to go. It's not my job to control him, to manipulate him into a life I consider healthy and happy. If he thinks this is simply wild romance, so be it. He wanted to work on that? Okay, let's do it, let's see where it goes. It means so much to him.
But I was uncomfortable too. Aren't I colluding with his compulsion? Enabling? And this would be exploration into the unknown. I didn't have a clue where it would go, but was somehow willing to find out. It made me a little nervous not having a plan or strategy, only my intention to stay with him, to be his alter ego in his own world of meaning. I had to soothe myself inwardly, remembering my early fear of going to summer camp for the first time, of facing an ominous unknown.
Going with his intention, we followed this toward its ultimate target: the experience he was seeking in getting his girlfriend back. He reveled in that time with Jessie, and I could see the strong romantic love he'd felt then. Powerful stuff. I also appreciated it as a gift that played an important part in his life journey.
Then there was that upwelling of feeling as he remembered the painful breakup with Jessie, the awful pain, grief, rage. Part of me wanted to jump in at that point—he's having a deeper experience, hooray! I'm a good therapist after all! Let's do something with this! Ask him to feel the feelings, be in touch with his body, something! Down girl, down.
Letting go of all that, I returned my interest to him and where he was going. We stayed with the emerging experience as it moved. He seemed comfortable with me in his tears, and was able to come to some moments of peace around this. The therapist part of me felt a little left out, though, like she wasn't doing much here. Yes, I know: my loving of him was creating the field for all this to happen.
And I was blown away by where he went. I am always surprised at what can come up if I just go with the client, being curious about his world and where he wants to go. My best guesses are often so wrong. Maybe that's why I still enjoy this work after all these years. Human beings are such a mystery.
After he'd encountered his grief and love in that first session, I remembered to come back to his original intention at the end, wanting to make sure we weren't wandering off from where he wanted to go (even though a part of me was relieved we'd stopped focusing on the girlfriend). He seemed fine with not figuring out how to get his girlfriend back for now and wanted to stay with what was coming up.
Here we see the therapist doing what she needed to do in order to join the client in his world and honor his own direction for the session. The client did not have to defend his intention or capitulate to some need of the therapist, but was able to go in the direction he intended. His will was respected.
In and through the freedom granted by spiritual empathy, by this love for the client, the client was able to pursue his aim and to discover what was there to discover. Again, the exploration stage does not imply any sort of comprehensive examination of the unconscious; it is simply a description of what will happen as spiritual empathy operates—the survival mode begins to lift and the client can begin to look around.
And where this movement leads is unknown. The client here could have simply talked about strategies of getting his girlfriend back. Or reexperienced the good feelings of being with her. Or talked about his shame in wanting her back. Or become angry that she had left him. The therapist does not have some plan or agenda, no recipe she follows. Just love, agape.
In order for the therapist to stay with the client here, she needed to be able to walk into the unknown with him. Remember, spiritual empathy is largely about not knowing. This is part of recognizing and respecting the client's will; we cannot know what the client is going to choose, and so must be empathically curious about this—relating to the person, not the theory.
Just as in any creative process, the therapist must let go of the known in order to allow the process to unfold. And as with any creative endeavor, this will expose therapists to discomfort and may trigger early experiences of wounding. To again quote from the neurobiological approach, “A therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into whatever relationship the patient has in mind—even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in him” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2001, 178).
How do we feel about not knowing what is happening? Unable to explain ourselves to our supervisor, our client, even ourselves? Not being in control? Being powerless to direct the process? Feeling the anguish of chaos with no end in sight? All these experiences and more will be encountered in any creative process, no less in psychosynthesis therapy.
In the previous example, the therapist's ability to meet the client just as he is, despite her reservations and resistances, allowed him to trust her to be with him. This allowed her into his world. This is the only thing that can allow one into another's world. Your world will not fit in the other's world; you must be able to die to your world and be reborn in your client's world.
As this happened, there was an alignment of “I” (client) to “I” (therapist) and a realization of their union. The trust born of this realization allowed the client to begin to unveil his wish of winning his girlfriend back even against the embarrassing criticism coming from his friends.
This unveiling of his true intention, or at least the truest one he knew at the time, was a movement from the survival unifying center of his critical friends and inner judge (“you are a fool”) toward a communion with the therapist as an authentic unifying center. The therapist was seeing him, whereas the others were occupied with controlling him, fixing him, objectifying him (though “with good intentions”).
This union of “I” and “I” empowered the exploration, allowing client and therapist alike to move into the unknown. Here they began walking a journey together, the client trusting that he would be able to see what was there to be seen and need not be worried about an ulterior motive driving the therapist. He was not afraid that if they found something, the therapist would use it as ammunition to further her own agenda. Again, this is a function of the therapist's willingness to let go, to die and be reborn.
The client here also experienced some amount of disidentification from survival personality. This actually began early in the vignette with his decision to say what he truly wanted to do in the session. He could have bowed to the inner and outer survival unifying centers and pretended he did not want his girlfriend back, seeking to become the person they wanted him to be. This would be to build another layer of survival personality. However, his trust in the therapist allowed him to reveal what he truly wanted to do even though this was embarrassing.
Having permission to follow his own intention, and being joined in this intention, he experienced a continuity of being that allowed still another disidentification to take place. He found his focus shifting away from the compulsive pattern toward what was driving this pattern: a craving for the experience of love and an aversion to the primal wounding.
This is a shift in identification. He is no longer simply a “romantic” or “lover,” not someone simply seeking love, but also someone managing profoundly painful feelings by being compulsive in relationships—and someone who can now seek healing and authenticity. This is a shift from survival personality toward authentic personality, as he is discovering more about who he truly is.
An important aspect of the exploration stage is that this may include all levels of the unconscious (see chapter 1). Assagioli writes of this stage, “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,” and then adds:
The regions of the middle and higher unconscious should likewise be explored. In that way we shall discover in ourselves hitherto unknown abilities, our true vocations, our higher potentialities which seek to express themselves, but which we often repel and repress through lack of understanding, through prejudice or fear. (Assagioli 2000, 19)
We can see in our vignette the client and therapist moving at all levels in the oval diagram, again, a movement allowed by spiritual empathy. The session began with the client's conscious experience and intention (evoking “I” with its functions of consciousness and will) as he became clear he wanted to work on getting his girlfriend back. This exploration of the feelings and thoughts around the conscious issue was a movement into the middle unconscious.
The next thing that happened was that they were both surprised by a reliving and re-owning of a capacity for love that the client had forsaken at the time of his breakup with Jessie—an expansion toward the higher unconscious, a lifting of a “repression of the sublime” (Haronian 1974). But this expansion toward the higher unconscious allowed him to reconnect to the lower unconscious—the upwelling of grief surrounding the memory of the loss of his first love, contacting a level of pain that he was unable to process at the time and so had repressed, that is, an expansion toward the lower unconscious. In other words, the client here experienced an expansion of the middle unconscious, an expansion of his experiential range in a movement toward increasing authenticity. This expansion is a disentrancement from the survival trance.
Client and therapist might work further with both of these levels in subsequent sessions depending upon where the empathic field led them. Through any number of techniques, they could work with the recognition, acceptance, and integration of these recovered heights and depths.
A point to emphasize in the exploration stage is that it is easy, especially after an extended time in the survival stage, for the therapist to become somewhat giddy when a breakthrough finally happens, whether this is contact with higher or lower unconscious content. Here it seems that at last the client is “doing something” so we may be tempted to eagerly seize upon the emerging experience, the budding insight, the new potential, the wound to be healed.
But again, this type of reaction is coming from our own separate world and agenda. Having the client “do something” is not our job. To pounce on a breakthrough in this way is an empathic failure, giving the clear message that therapy is about the client having particular types of experiences rather than simply going where the client feels moved to go.
All such reactions and more must be negotiated by the psychosynthesis therapist in order to keep spiritual empathy, empathic love, flowing. And as the frozenness of identification and entrancement slowly melts in the light of this love, clients may—or may not—move from the exploration stage toward the next stage, Emergence of “I.”