Roberto Assagioli

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Roberto Assagioli (Venice, February 27, 1888 - Capolona d'Arezzo, August 23, 1974) was an influential Italian psychiatrist who was the founder of the psychological movement known as Psychosynthesis. He was the first psychiatrist to integrate elements of what are often considered religious and spiritual concepts into modern psychology. [1]

Life

Assagioli was born of a Jewish mother. He was imprisoned by the Italian dictator of World War II, Benito Mussolini, but was later freed through the intervention of powerful friends. He described his period in jail as a blessing in disguise. Solitary confinement led Assagioli to a self-examination of inner freedom. When he was released, he wrote, "My dedication is to the task of helping men and women free themselves from inner prisons."

Assagioli was one of three Italians credited with being pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement. As a medical student, he introduced Freud's concept of psychoanalysis to his professors in Florence.

While embracing the radical new currents of psychoanalysis, he simultaneously - in 1910 - began a critique of that same psychoanalysis. He saw that it was only partial in that it neglected the exploration of what Maslow, some sixty years later, would call "the farther reaches of human nature." Thus he began the groundwork for Psychosynthesis. He saw that there was a need for something beyond analysis. This was the need for a person to become whole - to be united in synthesis. Assagioli's purpose was to create a scientific approach which encompassed the whole human being - creativity and will, joy and wisdom, as well as impulses and drives. He wanted this integrative approach to be practical - not only an understanding of how we live, but a tool to help us live better, more fully, according to the best that is within each of us. He called this approach psychosynthesis.

Assagioli maintained that just as there was a lower unconscious, there was also a superconscious. He describes this as a realm of the psyche which contains our deepest potential, the source of the unfolding pattern of our unique human path of development. Assagioli distinguishes psychosynthesis from psychoanalysis, but his intention was not to replace psychoanalysis, but rather to complement and include it.

Psychosynthesis then is not simply a model of pathology and treatment, but a developmental approach which can help guide a person to understand the meaning of their human life within the broad context of synthesis - the drive towards the harmonization of all relationships, whether intrapersonal, or interpersonal, between individuals and groups.

His colleagues included Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung and Rabindranath Tagore. Assagioli was also a coworker of Alice Bailey, who had founded a New Age esoteric school called the Arcane School. In the book Discipleship in the New Age, channeled by Bailey to a small group of students, he is known by the initials F.C.D. standing for "Freedom from Ties, Chelaship, and Detachment."[2]. It was his intention that this information would never be made public because of concern that his connection with Alice Bailey would harm the professional standing of Psychosynthesis. Peter Roche de Coppens, one of the few to so much as hint at the Assagioli-Bailey connection, wrote in Quest Magazine in August, 1994:

"Assagioli developed a friendship with Alice A. Bailey, who connected him with spiritual traditions, the esoteric mysteries, and the teachings that she had articulated in numerous books"—read, "The Tibetan!"

In The Act of Will, [3] Assagioli declares:

"Only the development of his inner powers can offset the dangers inherent in man's losing control of the tremendous natural forces at his disposal and becoming the victim of his own achievements."

Work

Psychosynthesis is a uniquely synthetic approach to psychology developed by Roberto Assagioli, M.D. Although it has points in common with Humanistic psychology, Transpersonal psychology, and Existential psychology; the emphasis in Psychosynthesis is on the possibility of progressive integration of the personality around its own essential Self through the use of the will. To this end, it uses a number of specifically designed psychological training methods and techniques.


Assagioli had (in common with Abraham Maslow) considerable interest in the creative powers of the human personality, and in peak experiences; and he intended Psychosynthesis as a way to unify the ordinary levels of consciousness with the higher creative and transpersonal levels of being. In Psychosomatic Medicine and Bio-psychosynthesis Roberto Assagioli states that the principle aims and tasks of psychosynthesis are:

  1. The elimination of the conflicts and obstacles, conscious and unconscious, that block [the complete and harmonious development of the human personality]:
  2. The use of active techniques to stimulate the psychic functions still weak and immature.


The following concepts and applications may be considered at the core of Psychosynthetic training:

  1. disidentification
  2. the personal self
  3. the will
  4. the ideal model
  5. synthesis (in its various aspects)
  6. the superconscious
  7. the transpersonal Self


Psychosynthesis Egg Diagram

In essence, psychosynthesis can be best represented by "egg diagram."

  1. The Lower Unconscious
  2. The Middle Unconscious
  3. The Higher Unconscious
  4. The Field of Consciousness
  5. The Conscious Self or "I"
  6. The Higher Self
  7. The Collective Unconscious

Selected works

Legacy

The success of Assagioli's work in the field of Psychosynthesis was considered by many to create the foundation of the Transpersonal Psychology movement. Martha Crampton, Director of the Canadian Institute of Psychosynthesis, expressed

"Assagioli had the vision and the courage to put forward in psychiatry an approach that did justice to all the dimensions of man—physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, even though the view ran counter to the prevailing mechanistic conceptions of the time."

:

Assagioli was a bold innovator who lived to see his ideas take form in hundreds of articles, books in many languages, students in numerous countries, a body of theory pregnant with new implications and consequences, and centers continuing to develop his work in the United States, Canada, England, Italy, Switzerland, France, Greece and Argentina. His ideas were far ahead of his time. He developed his work in 1910 and it was only in the late sixties that, with the suddenness born of deep and massive need, his books and other writings were taken up by thousands.

One of his colleagues described him in his later years:

His face was shining with an extraordinary, radiant, inner glow, such as I have never encountered in an octogenarian, and rarely in men much younger. This message of joy, perceived immediately, communicated immediately, is the finest memory which I keep of the numerous meetings which we later had with him. He elicited the joy of Self-realization in those who came to see him. He found joy in the contemplation of beauty, of art, of ideas, of service; of science, of nature. It was the joy of this knowing that must have made the years of his waiting easy. This was a far-seeing joy, one that grew on his love of contemplating from his garden the vast and starry reaches of the Italian sky - the endless worlds, the living cosmic miracle of what is and what is becoming.

Notes

  1. http://aap-psychosynthesis.org/assagioli.htm
  2. http://www.almankoff.com/psyn.shtml
  3. Roberto Assagioli, The Act of Will, (2002), Viking Adult Publisher, p. 6, ISBN 0670103098 ISBN 978-0670103096.

References
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External links



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