‘The Act of Imagination:
Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy in Experiential Context’
by Allan Frater
-an edited extract
The below extract from the opening of my new book ‘The Act of Imagination’ (published by Transpersonal Press, April 2026) answers the question of ‘what is psychosynthesis?’ in respect to its root principles – that it is an experience (rather than a particular theory or set of techniques) of synthesis in psychological life. This opening establishes the subsequent approach, pursued throughout the book, towards the apparent elusiveness of psychosynthesis, not by pinning it down to this or that particular theoretical framework, but rather by learning to notice, value and work with the principles of experiential-synthesis. The result is a reflective conversation within which to gently question, wonder and re-vision the richness of not just what psychosynthesis is, but also, more importantly, what it does, and how to creatively facilitate its expression as an “act of imagination.”
This Is Not the Truth
I assumed the teacher was joking when she wrote THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH across the top of the whiteboard.
“The following seminar,” she went on to explain, “will not be the truth.”
This was just too weird to get my head around.
It was the first day of my training to be a psychosynthesis psychotherapist. I’d arrived full of enthusiasm, expecting to have all the best, most efficacious theories and therapeutic methods spelt out clearly and precisely. To be told how things were; to be told the truth.
But as the training went on, whenever I grabbed hold of one truth it was quickly eclipsed by another—both coming under the heading of psychosynthesis, and also not.
The importance of finding something called an “observer position” was emphasized by some teachers and critiqued as dangerously alienating by others; for some, we were “not our feelings”, while others suggested we were “more than our feelings”. Some teachers offered “harmony” and “unity” as desirable goals, but this seemed to clash with the acceptance of tensions and differences favoured by others.
I wanted to know what made psychosynthesis particular. It was all well and good learning about a broad swathe of teachings and techniques, but as time went by, a clear outline of something that could reasonably be called psychosynthesis seemed ever harder to recognize.
Why were all these seemingly well-meaning teachers being so deliberately eclectic? Was this mystical NOT THE TRUTH stuff really necessary? Couldn’t they just agree among themselves on the best version of psychosynthesis and then give me a coherent training?
My wish for a more easily understood psychosynthesis might have been granted in an alternative history. In my imagined scenario, Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974), founder of psychosynthesis, would have taught his psychology to a small cohort of students in an isolated Italian town tucked away at the end of a dusty mountain path and then those same students would have faithfully passed on the teachings intact to successive generations—all of whom continued to live cut off from the rest of the world. Within such a hermetic society it might have been possible to write up a distinct set of teachings and practices, a book that we could hold up and say, “This is psychosynthesis.”
But of course, this is just a silly fantasy. Psychosynthesis has long since stepped down into the world.
Assagioli was no hermit. He travelled widely, speaking at conferences, giving interviews, and meeting and corresponding with many of the leading intellectuals of his day. His was a lifetime of discussion and reflection that he poured into published works across many decades; a written legacy that, far from offering a simplistic and standardized presentation, is, in fact, a complex body of work, with many subtle tensions and beguiling inconsistencies. But we need not stop there.
There is no orthodoxy in psychosynthesis.1 Assagioli never saw his teaching as the final word on psychosynthesis and encouraged others to build upon the beginnings he had made.2,3
In training schools around the world, the next generation of teachers and writers has now shaped psychosynthesis into a multitude of presentations, some more similar than others, but nevertheless, with significant differences emerging between them.
These teachers and writers are moving psychosynthesis ever further away from an easily recognizable and distinct set of teachings and practices. And yet, despite their differences, there is a commonality in all these presentations, something that determines what is and is not psychosynthesis that can be traced back to the original presentation by Assagioli.
The problem is that establishing what constitutes this original presentation is not entirely straightforward. While there are many brilliant teachers and writers who studied directly with Assagioli and can tell us all about his psychosynthesis, their teaching will not be exactly the same as the primary source but an interpretation of the original.
In the same way that a contemporary performance of Romeo and Juliet, even if we try to make it “authentic”, will be seen very differently to how it was received in Shakespeare’s time, so too how we read, understand, and practise the original teachings of psychosynthesis will be different from how they were originally conceived and communicated in Assagioli’s time.
Psychosynthesis today happens in a very different world to the one in which Assagioli first presented it.4 Post-Assagioli teachers and writers will have inevitably drawn upon personal, cultural, and intellectual influences unavailable to Assagioli, all of which will have shaped how the wealth of material produced across Assagioli’s lifetime is presented, with some aspects being emphasized and elaborated upon, while other aspects are critiqued, downplayed, or quietly ignored.
In this way, the practice of psychosynthesis moves on, incorporating new developments. This means that, rather than trying to figure out which is the correct presentation, a perhaps more immediate or realistic concern is how to make sense of all this diversity and difference.
A first quotation from Assagioli shares his thinking on this matter:
“Since each can only be a partial expression of what we call “psychosynthesis”, it is well to gain experience of psychosynthesis through the methods and personalities of various psychosynthesists.”5
Assagioli acknowledges in this statement how each book, article, essay, video, or training seminar on psychosynthesis will only ever be “a partial expression”. Each source will provide a more or less different emphasis or perspective on what we call “psychosynthesis”, but no singular account will express the whole truth. Assagioli therefore recommends gaining experience from “various psychosynthesists”, attending to a multiplicity of sources, as if gathering the pieces of a jigsaw in order to establish as full a picture as possible; hence, the eclecticism in my psychotherapy training.
The protean multiplicity of teaching perspectives was entirely intentional, as was the reluctance to pin down psychosynthesis to any one system or framework. On offer was a smorgasbord of partial expressions, from which students were encouraged to critically allow their own understanding of psychosynthesis to evolve—and then become yet another partial expression.
As a beginning student, I found this seemingly limitless openness somewhat overwhelming. I felt confused as to what, if anything, was holding it all together. I did not understand where to begin.
My problem lay in assuming psychosynthesis is something it is not: a set of ideas and techniques written down on whiteboards and found in books. But this is not really what it is. What we call psychosynthesis, writes Assagioli, “should not be looked upon as a particular psychological doctrine, nor as a single technical procedure”.6
And yet, to conclude from this that it has no coherence would be to go too far.
Psychosynthesis does have a recognizable shape and expression, which this book now sets out to explore. Psychosynthesis counsellors, coaches, and psychotherapists will most obviously find this of interest. However, what follows has also been written with the general interest reader in mind and requires no prior knowledge of psychosynthesis. It is both an introduction and a new presentation of psychosynthesis, one that emphasizes its creative and imaginative aspects in experiential context.
What Is Psychosynthesis?
Before describing what psychosynthesis is, it is important to first make clear what it is not.
Psychosynthesis is not the theoretical frameworks used to think about it. In the same way that a book about oil painting—filled with ideas on composition, brushstroke technique, and colour theory—is clearly not to be confused with the actual experience of painting a picture on a canvas, so too theories about psychosynthesis are not the actual experience of psychosynthesis. This is a distinction that Assagioli pointed towards when he wrote, “Experience is one thing, doctrine another.”7
Of course, this is not to suggest that the theories are false or wrong. The literature on psychosynthesis is a rich source of practically useful psychological knowledge, revealing patterns of meaning that would otherwise remain hidden, such as when one uses a map to navigate unfamiliar terrain. If we are lost in a psychological storm, buffeted by the winds of anxiety and depression, such theoretical maps can be incredibly helpful; however, as the saying goes, “The map is not the territory.”8
There is always a radical gap between theory and lived experience. Books contain ideas and examples, but actual attempts to put them into experiential practice will always bring up lots of questions not answered by the text.
No matter how effective or beneficial the theory, it will never completely mirror the complexity of lived experience; therefore, instead of getting caught up in searching for psychosynthesis in the literature, appreciating this experiential gap allows us to turn our attention towards what it is really about. This is why the first teaching on my psychosynthesis training was THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH.
When the teacher wrote this phrase across the top of the whiteboard, she was effectively saying, “What follows in this seminar is a collection of ideas about the truth, but don’t mistake them for that truth.” The theoretical presentation was intended heuristically; that is, something to help us notice and engage the experiential wellspring of psychosynthesis but not itself to be mistaken for it.
This is indicated by another aphorism from psychosynthesis training:
“When we take the principlesand methods of psychosynthesis as “working hypotheses”, life is an adventure. But if we take the principles and methods as “the truth”, life becomes a tragedy.”9
As a “working hypothesis”, psychosynthesis theory requires additional research—in the sense of trying it out in practice to see if the teachings and techniques do indeed describe and shape experience as promised.
Certainly, for me, as a trainee therapist, the working hypothesis more than delivered on its promises. It gave me a language that seemed to have an almost magical explanatory power, bringing previously vague and overlooked feelings and thoughts into sharp and enlivening focus; such that, instead of muddling along on autopilot, there were moments when I responded more creatively to difficult people and situations.
It was not that my problems all suddenly went away, but there were glimpses of new possibility creeping into my life, as if someone had opened a gate to a beautiful garden and said, “This is all for you. Go explore.”
This begs the question: How can such an adventure turn to tragedy?
Tragedy ensues when we mistake effectiveness for truth, and despite occasional reminders of THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH, much of the training and literature on psychosynthesis fails to distinguish between ideas about the psyche and psychological life itself. Bold assertions such as “The lower unconscious is where . . .” and “Childhood wounding is the source of . . .” can seem to imply at least a degree of certitude.
For example, rather than being understood as just a helpful way of thinking about experience, the idea of “the unconscious” becomes mistaken for a personal psychological interiority, and instead of being appreciated as just one of many possible ways of thinking about the causes of psychological suffering, the idea of “childhood wounding” becomes the only explanation.
In this way, the gap between theory and experience collapses and psychosynthesis becomes a tragedy by quickly explaining away experiences.
Psychosynthesis Principles
To maintain psychosynthesis as an adventure, this book will be presenting a “principial” perspective. The word “principial”, meaning “related to or based on principles”, is an adjective that connects well to the above aphorism, where “life is an adventure” when we approach “the principles . . . of psychosynthesis as ‘working hypotheses’”. Assagioli explicitly made this same point when he wrote, “What is important are the principles and the basic purpose of the entire endeavour.”10
A shared principial basis will be shown to be what connects the diversity of teachings and techniques on psychosynthesis, and also what makes them recognizable as something called ‘psychosynthesis’, like the taste of salt running through all the oceans and seas. It is therefore important to begin by clarifying these principles.
The first principle has already been established.
“[Psychosynthesis] is proven by its direct experience; it is one of those primary experiences which are the evidences of themselves. Just as colour, a sense of beauty . . . need no explanation.”11
The first guiding principle of psychosynthesis is experience. Just as eating, sleeping, and walking are naturally occurring experiences, so too is psychosynthesis. It is therefore not so much explained or taught or proven by ideas or theories as discovered by an experiential engagement.
It is an engagement that can be seen across all psychosynthesis teachings and techniques—the various theoretical “partial expressions” involving many different ways to notice and think about the experience of psychosynthesis, and the numerous techniques and applications involving many different ways to actively participate and engage with this same experiential ground.
However, this first principle alone is not sufficient, as it does not tell us what type of experience is particular to psychosynthesis, so we now turn to a description of a related twin principle.
Synthesis not Analysis
The second guiding principle of psychosynthesis begins with its name, which can be traced to the title of Assagioli’s doctoral thesis “La Psicosintesi” (Psychosynthesis), submitted to the University of Florence in 1910.
While Assagioli was not the first to use the term “psychosynthesis”, he was the first to base a whole psychology around a comprehensive application of it.12,13 At least in part, this application can be seen to have emerged as a result of his involvement in the psychoanalytic group that formed around Freud during the early 1900s.
Assagioli did not reject this early influence upon his thinking but in writing his doctoral thesis took the opportunity to critique what he considered “to be some of the limitations of Freud’s views”.14 Within this context, the inclusion of the word “synthesis” offers a significant clue as to the second guiding principle of psychosynthesis, because synthesis is the opposite of analysis.
Freud conceived of analysis as a method to rationally explain the psychological life of his patients. His insight was that it is easier to understand the complexity of a whole life by analyzing its parts (analysis meaning “the separation of a whole into its component parts”).
Breaking down psychological difficulties and relationships into constituent parts—feelings, thoughts, obsessional behaviours, traumatic memories, and so on—can certainly be a helpful way of making experiences comprehensible.
And yet, there are downsides to an analytical treatment of psychological life. So before considering the advantages Assagioli saw in synthesis, it will be important to first understand the limitations—not of the rich field of psychoanalysis as a whole, but more specifically the idea and method of analysis, per se.
Let’s explore this idea by using the analogy of a lion in a zoo.
To study a lion in a zoo is not the same as studying a lion in the savannah. A dusty and bored lion viewed through the bars of a cage in a western zoo is not a sleek and alert lion wandering free beneath the African sun. Of course, the animal in the cage is technically the same as the savannah lion, but only in a narrow physical sense, as an object. Without the network of relations needed to support its full expression—the environment, the lion community, the prey it hunts, and so on—what lies in the corner of the cage is a mere shadow of the lion in its natural context.
The savannah lion is not just surrounded by this network of relations but is actually created and sustained by them. Broadly speaking, the savannah lion effectively is this web of relations, such that, on transportation to the zoo, separated from the other relationships or parts that make up the whole, the savannah lion no longer really exists.
As with lions separated from the savannah, this is also the case with aspects of psychological life separated from experiential context. The limitation of analysis on psychological life is a radical simplification of complex experience.
Consider my own feelings of anxiety, for example. Analysis takes my anxious life—a complex amalgam of confused thoughts, sleeplessness, a sickness in my gut, and endless doom scrolling on my phone—and turns it into a psychological “part”. In this way, my being an anxious whole person has been changed by analysis into only part of me being anxious.
It is a subtle but significant shift in emphasis, turning the complexity of my overall anxious experience into the simplicity of an inner psychological object; such that, I can now think about my anxiety from a safe distance, like peering at a lion through the bars of a cage. In the short term, this can give a welcome sense of perspective, as now what matters is not so much that I’m anxious but how I think about this anxiety.
This might appear to be a good thing, right? Well, yes and no.
The problem comes when attempts to change the anxious part happens without any consideration of the network of relationships that constitute my anxiety. This is a familiar scenario to any psychotherapist, as clients often begin therapy wanting to change a particular behaviour or symptom, as if it is somehow completely separate from the rest of their lives.
Of course, it is reasonable to want therapeutic help with anxiety, and if a therapist then analyses my anxiety as part of me, this can also reasonably lead to the assumption that changing this anxious part will be what helps.
However, this anxious part does not exist in isolation, like a lion in the zoo; rather, it is created and sustained by an intricate web of relationships, not just within me but also with other people and the surrounding world.
So if the therapy continues to ignore the perpetuation of my anxiety within this wider experiential context, then at best only superficial change will be possible, and at worst, what might have been a perfectly appropriate anxious response to a difficult real-world situation (economic insecurity, political instability, ecological collapse) is signposted as a personal psychological failure, resulting in an internalized shame that drains the vitality and spontaneity out of my life.
Mechanical or Ecological Psyche?
Analysis is a way of thinking about the human psyche as if it were a machine that can be broken down into component parts and simply repaired. However, the rather obvious but much overlooked limitation of this metaphor is that human beings are not machines. Psychological life can be analysed as if it is a machine with parts, but we need to remember that it is not actually a mechanism with clear dividing lines between the parts.
Psychological parts only exist as abstractions, as simplified ideas about experiences that are quite unlike the drive shafts, fan belts and spark plugs that make up machines. For example, when we pay close attention to personal experience, we do not find a clear point of separation where feeling ends and thought begins, nor where a bodily sensation becomes an intuition or a memory.
Not all theories are of equal value. While there will always be a gap between theory and lived experience, the more valuable theories will be those that close the gap by more closely aligning conceptual understanding with experiential practice.15
As we have seen, the idea of analysis unwittingly alters what it seeks to explain by assuming it to be a simplistic mechanism of discrete parts. But this does not help us notice and engage with the experiential complexity of psychological life, where everything is connected to everything else with no clear separation between the parts. What is needed then is a better idea that does.
Assagioli chose to employ the word “synthesis” precisely because it describes the relational complexity of psychological life. Instead of dividing up the whole into its parts, synthesis is the process and outcome of bringing the parts together, having a two-fold dictionary definition as both “the process of combining objects or ideas into a complex whole” and “the combination or whole produced by such a process”.16 The choice of the term “psychosynthesis” underscores the importance Assagioli attributed to an experiential appreciation of psychological life, not as a machine but as an ecosystem, in what he calls a “bio-synthesis”:
“Psychosynthesis is essentially . . . a bringing together in an organic whole, diverse and sometimes conflicting elements, but in an organic whole in which each element preserves its own individuality and function in operation with all the others, and the faithful human body is the perfect example of bio-synthesis; that is, each cell, each organ, each apparatus concurs to the general health, the vitality of the whole organism, but each completes its own function more or less independently, up to a certain point, but in unison, by that I mean organic unity.”17
Just as a body is made up of a network of cells and organs, psychosynthesis combines diverse psychological elements into an “organic whole”. In the view of psychosynthesis, psychological suffering is not due to a faulty part, as analysis would have it, but to restricted synthesis and the resulting isolation or identification of psychological life with only a part of the whole, in the same way that a blocked artery causes a heart attack or an unwatered houseplant withers and dies.
Psychosynthesis seeks to improve the relationships among all the various parts of the psyche, facilitating what Assagioli suggested to be a natural evolutionary tendency towards increasingly complex levels of synthesis.
During the early 20th century, a time when mechanistic analysis dominated psychology, the development of psychosynthesis involved a prescient vision, one that anticipated a now almost taken-for-granted contemporary recognition of a synthetic perspective across multiple disciplines. This involves a perspective where the health of any one part—whether an individual human or a humpback whale, a rainforest, or a nation state—feeds back and affects the health of the system as a whole; a world view no longer dominated by separation but learning to appreciate a holistic understanding.
A Psychology of Wholeness
With the recognition of synthesis as a second guiding principle, a beginning description of psychosynthesis could then be a “psychology of wholeness that synthesizes all the parts”.
The teachings of psychosynthesis are those ideas and concepts that help us better notice and think about the process of synthesis in psychological life, and the techniques are ways to cooperate experientially with this in clinical practice. The outcome, or aim, of this process is the healing of the suffering created by a fragmented part-life cut off from the wider possibilities of the psyche as a whole.
In other words: The psychosynthesis method is one of facilitating the process of synthesis, and its goal is the outcome of this synthesis process, an understanding that can be seen in the following brief descriptions:
“In its most basic sense, psychosynthesis is a name for the conscious attempt to cooperate with the natural process of growth—the tendency in each of us and in our world to harmonize and synthesize various aspects at ever higher levels of organization.”18
“Psychosynthesis . . . can be indicated above all as an attitude and a slow conquest towards integration and synthesis in every field . . . . It could be called a movement, a trend, a destination.”19
Psychosynthesis is not static; it is “a movement, a trend” cooperating with a “natural process of growth” by “bringing together in an organic whole” the various aspects of psychological life at “ever higher levels of organization”; in other words, a process and outcome of synthesis evident on many levels.
Synthesis is most obviously seen in the way introductory texts distinguish psychosynthesis by emphasizing its holistic inclusion of the full spectrum of human experience, bringing together psychological symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, with aesthetic, spiritual, and heightened non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Synthesis is also evident in the way that all psychological functions—feeling, thinking, sensation, imagination, intuition—are considered equally and together as a synthesis, with no single function being prioritized in isolation over any other.
Furthermore, synthesis is not only applied on the level of the individual personality but also within relationships as an “inter-individual” synthesis and throughout culture, society, and ecology as a “cosmic synthesis”.20
The particular method of any given psychosynthesis therapy session will also itself be a synthesis of theories, techniques, and influences incorporating a variety of approaches from within psychosynthesis itself, alongside contributions from other psychological orientations, including psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioural, existential-humanistic, and many others.
However, as we have already seen, this eclecticism can make it difficult to appreciate what is distinctive about psychosynthesis.21 Assagioli acknowledged this in an interview towards the end of his life:
“The limit of psychosynthesis is that it has no limits. It is too extensive, too comprehensive. Its weakness is that it accepts too much. It sees too many sides at the same time, and that is a drawback.”22
Since this interview, attempts have been made to resolve this “weakness” and “drawback”, which I will be discussing in the next three chapters.
One influential contribution suggests an overarching framework of “core concepts” that determine what constitutes a genuine psychosynthesis, which I will discuss in chapter 1.
Other contributions have tended to emphasize psychosynthesis as a particular set of techniques or methods, which I will discuss in chapter 2.
Other theorists have done the historical detective work of tracing the roots of psychosynthesis to the original influences Assagioli drew upon in the formation of his psychology. They use this as a basis for determining what to accept as psychosynthesis, which I will discuss in chapter 3.
While these attempts to provide a limiting framework to psychosynthesis bring a wealth of interesting and useful discussion, this book will show that placing limits upon psychosynthesis is not possible or even desirable. As we have seen, the identification of psychosynthesis with discrete concepts, techniques, and influences is to mistake it for a particular theoretical formulation, and therefore in danger of simplifying, if not obscuring, the experiential process of psychosynthesis.
By adding further presentations to the too many sides that cause the lack of limits in the first place, such frameworks exacerbate rather than resolve the apparent weakness they seek to resolve. This might seem to be a somewhat circular argument, akin to a snake eating its own tail, as if there is no escape from the ineluctable slipperiness of psychosynthesis; however, if not an escape, certainly a more interesting possibility emerges when we approach the openness of “no limits”—not as a problem to be solved but rather, as the whole point of psychosynthesis.
If the point of psychosynthesis is to gather in synthesis ever more elements in the creation of an ever greater whole, this will include not just personal-experiential elements, such as feelings and thoughts, but also theoretical paradigms and ideas, as well as methodological approaches and techniques.
With ongoing research and experimentation, there will always be a growing number of elements to include, as we can see from Assagioli writing: “Psychosynthesis is an open system: There is no end to it but only temporary halting places.”23,24 “An open system” is one with porous boundaries; therefore, psychosynthesis will always be incorporating further elements, in a journey of adventure with only “temporary halting places”.
If we stop travelling and imagine that we have finally arrived at the truth of psychosynthesis, this is when we are perhaps farthest from understanding. As Assagioli puts it, “Belief in having understood all indicates lack of understanding. It is a question of a gradual process.”25 But there is no final, definitive, limited presentation of psychosynthesis to be found.
The openness and lack of limits in psychosynthesis is only a weakness or drawback if we are expecting or assuming it to arrive at a destination called “the truth”, a point of arrival where it finally stops continually shape shifting in understanding, practice, and expression.
Once we get past this assumption and come to appreciate psychosynthesis as being in a constant state of becoming, as a journey that never ends, then the idea of “no limits” is transformed from a weakness into a defining strength. However, this is not to suggest that all presentations are equally valid and nothing can be done to further clarify the distinctiveness of psychosynthesis.
Synthesis Turned Back on Psychosynthesis
By now it should be clear that the intention of this book is not to offer a definitive or “correct” theoretical presentation of psychosynthesis. My argument is that this possibility has never existed and never will.
Even so, every book offers a perspective, and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise here. In what follows, the perspective will be principial; that is, as noted earlier, derived from first principles.
Thus, instead of analysing the various teachings, techniques, and influences as discrete ideas and methods, I will contextualize them with respect to each other, and seek the whole in the sum of the parts by turning the twin principles of “experiential synthesis” back upon psychosynthesis itself.
An account of psychosynthesis as an experiential synthesis is a novel approach, with no direct mention in the literature, but I will show it to exist as an implicit modus operandi; that is, an assumed culture that will become obvious when we examine the relationships among theoretical ideas, techniques, and influences and how they are applied experientially in relationships between teachers and students and therapists and clients.
In describing this network of relationships, I will reveal the distinctive pattern of psychosynthesis as a whole rather than focusing on the parts in isolation.
The following pages offer fresh explanations and appreciative critiques of the teachings of Assagioli. The simple preservation of concepts and methods from the past misses what makes psychosynthesis an adventure.26 Indeed, to approach each client in the same way, with a procedural application of predetermined techniques, regardless of the unique factors at play in any given therapeutic moment, is to fail to understand that psychosynthesis psychotherapy is a creative process.
What follows is a book-length reflective space and conversation that provides the space to gently question, wonder, and re-vision the richness of psychosynthesis. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are full of ideas, stories, clinical examples, and practical techniques that address Assagioli’s psychosynthesis in its experiential context. Chapter 4 offers a new partial expression of psychosynthesis as an “act of imagination” that, though differing in style, maintains the principial spirit of the original presentation by Assagioli.
Note: In order to provide a recognizable basis for critical discussion, as well as a comprehensive introduction to the topic, this book focuses on the original English-language presentation of psychosynthesis by Assagioli. Post-Assagioli literature is considered, but these secondary sources are mostly referenced in the book’s extensive end notes so as not to distract from the primary-source discussion.
Notes
1.“There is no orthodoxy in Psychosynthesis and no one, beginning with myself, should claim to be its real or true representative, its head or leader. Each of its exponents tries to express and apply it as well as he or she is able to, and all who read or listen to the message, or receive the benefit of the methods of Psychosynthesis, can decide how successful any exponent has been or will be in expressing its ‘spirits’.” (Assagioli, “Relationships Between the Various Foundations, Institutions, and Centers” / “Letter of Freedom”).
2. “I consider [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. I make a cordial appeal to all therapists, psychologists, and educators to actively engage in the needed work of research, experimentation and application. Let us feel and obey the urge aroused by the great need of healing the serious ills which at present are affecting humanity: let us realize the contribution we can make to the creation of a new civilization characterized by an harmonious integration and cooperation, pervaded by the spirit of synthesis.” (Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques,9.)
3. While the following was written in 1983, it arguably maintains its relevance today: “Psychosynthesis . . . is in the early adolescent stage of development. The coming of age, the maturing [will require a questioning] of the established ideas and models and to see the need for serious research and debate. I think many of the existing psychosynthesis models have been taken too literally and are I believe often used somewhat naively today. I think we need at this time to be more rigorous in our thinking about psychosynthesis theories and models and particularly in how we use them.” (Evans, Mirages of the Mind: Yearbook Vol. III, 7.)
4. Psychosynthesis therapists “now operate in a very different world than the one in which Assagioli developed his theories…” (Millichamp, Transpesonal Dynamics: The Relational Field, Depth Work and the Unconscious, 19.)
5. Assagioli, “Training: A Statement by Roberto Assagioli”, point 11.
6. Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, 30.
7. Assagioli, quoted in Guggisberg Nocelli, Know, Love, Transform Yourself: Theory, Techniques and New Developments in Psychosynthesis, Vol.1, 117.
8.“Maps are not the territory. We all know that, yet we often forget it. Maps are merely representations drawn from individual experience, measurements, observations, and estimations. Yet we know that maps give us ideas about what to look for, landmarks to notice and gauge our progress by, and a way of planning with some degree of accuracy.” (Young Brown, Unfolding Self: The Practice of Psychosynthesis, 99.)
9. Diana Whitmore, private e-mail correspondence with author, 15 November 2021.
10. Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, 65.
11. Assagioli, “Talks on the Self”.
12.Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, 11.
13. Guggisberg Nocelli, The Way of Psychosynthesis, 147–148.
14. Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, 280.
15. “It is useful to remember that the word theory is derived from the ancient Greek theorein, which means “to see”. A theory, then, is a “way of seeing” a topic, and different people will have different theories, depending on how they experience reality. Some theories will be more general, some more specific. All theories are biased and limited in some way. Therefore, the work of developing theory is to find a way of seeing that seems to fit the phenomena under observation and at the same time can gain enough consensus among fellow “seers” to be generally accepted. All theories are at best approximations and therefore never true in an absolute sense. They can, however, help us to see what is “there” to the best of our knowledge at the time. As we “see” more clearly over time, we can modify our theories or we can reject them as they cease to be useful. At any point in time, certain theories will inform the “seeing” of the majority while other theories will have a more marginal existence, either because they are becoming obsolete or because they have not yet been recognized as holding a way of seeing that reveals reality. Examining a theory, then, involves studying how people see certain phenomena and assessing how useful this way of seeing is in its capacity to illuminate and explain the aspect of reality under scrutiny.” (Yeomans, Readings in Psychosynthesis: Theory, Process & Practice, Volume 2, 251.)
16. www.collinsdictionary.com.
17. “Interview on Psychosynthesis with Roberto Assagioli”, accessed April 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9rVWAxE2hQ
18. Vargiu, Synthesis 3/4, The Realization of the Self, 144.
19. Assagioli, “Relationships Between the Various Foundations, Institutions, and Centers” / “Letter of Freedom”.
20. Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, 30–31.
21. “This inclusive understanding is not eclectic; it is synthetic—psychosynthesis holds all approaches and methods within a coherent view of the person and the person’s unfoldment. However, unless this overarching synthetic viewpoint is made clear, individual concepts and techniques become the focus and the broader perspective is lost.” (Firman and Gila, “Assagioli’s Seven Core Concepts for Psychosynthesis Training”, 1.)
22. Assagioli, “The Golden Mean of Roberto Assagioli”, interview by Sam Keen in Psychology Today.
23. Assagioli, “Training: a statement by Roberto Assagioli”, point 8.
24. “It is one of the beauties of psychosynthesis that it is not a closed system with rigid, crystallized methods. It provides an open structure that can integrate effective methods from other disciplines and leaves room for the creativity of the practitioner.” (Martha Crampton, quoted in Young Brown, Unfolding Self: The Practice of Psychosynthesis, 73.)
25. Assagioli, “Training: A Statement by Roberto Assagioli”, point 3.
26.“A tradition that just transmits the teachings of the founder is already dead.” (Pierro Ferruci, Foreword to Guggisberg Nocelli, Know, Love, Transform Yourself: Theory: Techniques and New Developments in Psychosynthesis, Vol.1, 23.)
Bibliography
Note: Assagioli articles marked * can be accessed at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/ (with thanks to Kenneth Sørensen).
Assagioli, Roberto. Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, 1965, 1995 edition.
Assagioli, Roberto. “Relationships Between the Various Foundations, Institutions, and Centers” (also known as “Letter of Freedom”), originally sent, in 1967, to the presidents, members of the boards of directors, and other officials of the foundations, institutes, and centres of psychosynthesis. First published in Psychosynthesis Digest Vol. I, No. 1, 1981, reprinted in Psychosynthesis International Directory, 1988.*
Assagioli, Roberto. “Training: A statement by Roberto Assagioli.” Instituto di Psicosintesi, 1974b.*
Assagioli, Roberto. “The Golden Mean of Roberto Assagioli.” Interview by Sam Keen, Psychology Today, 1974c.
Assagioli, Roberto. “Talks on the Self.” Handout from The Psychosynthesis and Education Trust, London, undated 1.*
Evans, Roger. Mirages of the Mind: Yearbook Vol. III, Institute of Psychosynthesis, 1983.
Firman, John and Ann Gila. “Assagioli’s Seven Core Concepts for Psychosynthesis Training.” Psychosynthesis Palo Alto, 2007, https://www.synthesiscenter.org/PDF/Seven%20Concepts.pdf
Guggisberg Nocelli, Petra. The Way of Psychosynthesis: A Complete Guide to Origins, Concepts, and the Fundamental Experiences, with a Biography of Roberto Assagioli. Synthesis Insights, Kindle edition, 2019.
Guggisberg Nocelli, Petra. Know, Love, Transform Yourself: Theory, Techniques, and New Developments in Psychosynthesis, Vol 1, Psychosynthesis Books, Kindle edition, 2021.
Millichamp, Stacey. Transpersonal Dynamics: The Relational Field, Depth Work , and the Unconscious. Transpersonal Press, 2018.
Yeomans, Thomas. Readings in Psychosynthesis: Theory, Process & Practice, Volume 2. Edited by Weiser and Yeomans. The Department of Applied Psychology/The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1988.
Young Brown, Molly. Unfolding Self: The Practice of Psychosynthesis. Allworth Press, 2004.
Vargiu, James (editor). Synthesis ¾: The Realization of the Self. Synthesis Press, 1977.