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Assagioli trained as a medical student in Florence in 1906, where he lived most of his life.  He subsequently trained as an analyst and psychiatrist, during which time he developed the concepts and theory of psychosynthesis.   At the beginning of the 20th century there was an uprising of exciting ideas in all areas of thought. Influences from the East were beginning to come over to the West and therefore religious thought was being reexamined, education was being revolutionised with such thinkers as Montessori, Froebel and Steiner, and the unconscious was being scientifically studied by Freud, among others.

This was therefore very much a Renaissance time and accordingly Assagioli drew from many fields and influences, though he tended to play down the more mystical aspects of his work, intending to gain scientific validity for his theories.  Inherent in the development of his ideas are both a scientific and a mystical approach.  His background training in medicine and psychiatry also included psychoanalysis and there are therefore strong psychodynamic roots in psychosynthesis.  In his doctoral thesis Assagioli gave a critique of Freud’s approach, claiming it was incomplete as it did not address the actualised elements of human nature and how to enable man to fully live his potential.  From early on he challenged the purely scientific and reductionist attitudes of the time, bringing to the forefront the possibility that man also has self actualising potential which can be stimulated and developed.

He was influenced by many spiritual and philosophical traditions and people, such as the Russian esotericist Ouspensky, the Sufi mystic Inhayat Khan,  Jung, Buber, the founder of logotherapy Viktor Frankl and Alice Bailey, with whom he was a close friend.  His concerns were towards fragmentation and the possibility for synthesis at both an individual and collective level, including an interest in education and social issues.  These spiritual and mystical influences mean that within psychosynthesis lies a deeply optimistic and structured approach to not just personal development, but spiritual synthesis, personally and culturally, in which the individual finds a meaningful, purposeful and interconnected place within the whole.

If we look more widely at the political and scientific context during Assagioli’s life (and indeed for much of this century), we begin to see that there was/is inherent in the culture a split between religion and science, and more deeply, a ‘myth of isolation’ (Goodbread Radical Intercourse) infusing the West during this time.  And therefore, despite the exciting movements and potential of the beginning of this century, there may be tendencies towards implicit beliefs of separateness within not just the development of psychosynthesis, but the way in which it is practised now.  I make this assertion because there is much evidence to suggest that the culture and its prevailing scientific paradigm has a very powerful impact on us as individuals whether we overtly ‘agree’ with it or not.  It becomes part of our psyche, which is especially obvious when we address the way in which we are connected to the collective unconscious in future chapters.  Jean Hardy cites Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he states that there is a predominant scientific paradigm at any one time which creates a set of models about the nature of the world.  This opinion is echoed by Hardy again in her pamphlet There is Another World, but it is This One, in which she expresses Karl Mannheim’s view that ‘the main institutions in that society….will represent that dominant set of assumptions about the nature of the society and its picture of reality’.  (1988. P3.)  These predominant paradigms affect our innermost being, influencing the way in which we construct reality and make meaning of the world around us.

In her book Quantum Self, Donar Zohar states that in this century we have been plagued by an alienation between consciousness and matter,  a sense that we are strangers in this world.  She traces these roots back to Plato’s distinction between the realm of ideas and experience, Christianity’s favouring of the soul over the body (or at the cost of the body as somehow a vessel for sin), and the 17th Century philosophical and scientific revolution which brought in Cartesian doubt and Newtonian physics.  The living cosmos of the Greek and mediaeval times in which the universe is filled with mystery, intelligence and purpose, was replaced by the sense of the universe as a clockwork machine.

In her book Quantum Self, Donar Zohar states that in this century we have been plagued by an alienation in between consciousness and matter,  a sense that we are strangers in this world.  She traces these roots back to Plato’s distinction between the realm of ideas and knowledge, Christianity’s favouring of the soul more than the body (or at the price of the physique as somehow a vessel for sin), and the 17th Century philosophical and scientific revolution which brought in Cartesian doubt and Newtonian physics.  The living cosmos of the Greek and mediaeval occasions in which the universe is filled with mystery, intelligence and purpose, was replaced by the sense of the universe as a clockwork machine.

stacey millichamp

Jean Hardy cites Thomas Kuhn’s function The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he states that there is a predominant scientific paradigm at any 1 time which creates a set of models about the nature of the globe.  This opinion is echoed by Hardy once again in her pamphlet There is Another World, but it is This One, in which she expresses Karl Mannheim’s view that ‘the major institutions in that society….will represent that dominant set of assumptions about the nature of the society and its picture of reality’.  (1988. P3.)  These predominant paradigms have an effect on our innermost becoming, influencing the way in which we construct reality and make which means of the globe around us.

stacey millichamp