Roberto Assagioli: biography of the spirit scientist

Roberto Assagioli was the founder of the psychosynthesis school of thought. An approach that started from the empirical foundations of psychology, but that completely went outside the parameters of scientific psychology. He studied the person as a personality and as a soul.

In the therapies that Roberto Assagioli developed, the unconscious played an important role, but in balance with rational and conscious work. Besides, his theories about The interaction between the psyche and the body formed the basis of psychosomatic medicine.

Its main idea supports that the individual is in a constant process of personal growth. The achievement of all its hidden potential is the ultimate goal and its method seeks the transformation of all these potentialities.

The purpose of psychosynthesis would be to first identify each substructure and then integrate them so that they work together harmoniously. Assagioli too He was interested in the spiritual development of the human being and the problems that can arise in each phase of spiritual development.. In this sense, psychosynthesis is deeply linked to transpersonal psychology.

His early life and youth

Roberto Assagioli was born in Venice in 1888. He grew up in a family with interests in art, music and literature. It seems that his mother’s theosophy studies had a decisive influence in his great interest in Eastern philosophies.

As a teenager he traveled a lot and awakened a special taste for the ideals of freedom of non-violent and non-dogmatic social movements. His travels taught him that human beings are the same, no matter where they come from. Since young He defended that in all human beings there is a desire to develop their maximum potential..

He studied at the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence. He completed a doctoral thesis titled Psychosynthesis which contemplated a holistic approach to psychology with special attention to human growth and experiences of spiritual dimensions.

Although his vision of psychology was based on many of the foundations of psychoanalysishis approach tended to distance himself from it due to its proximity to the pathological side of the human psyche. An idea that many humanistic psychologists shared.

Also considered that human consciousness had more layers of consciousness than the model proposed by Freud. Assagioli was attracted to a psychology that also contemplated the love, will, wisdom, creativity and spirituality of the human being. In 1911, he began to formulate the basic concepts of psychosynthesis, a work to which he dedicated his entire life.

Your professional career

After finishing his medical studies, Assagioli He trained in psychiatry in Switzerland under the prestigious Eugen Bleuler.the pioneer who defined schizophrenia and one of the first to accept psychoanalysis.

There he met Carl Jung and they became friends. Assagioli thought that Jungian psychology was closest to psychosynthesis. In 1926, the first Institute of culture and psychic therapy opened in Rome. In 1928, he gave a series of lectures entitled The latent energies in us and their use in education and medicine.

Psychosynthesis works from the premise that any emotion or reaction has an opposite. and that the job is to create a synthesis between the two. What would produce this synthesis would be the active self, the observing self, the controlling factor and the higher Self. He agreed with psychoanalysis that the healing of childhood traumas and a healthy ego were necessary conditions for the good psychological development of the individual, but he did not stop there.

Assagioli defended that a healthy person has a potential for growth, what Abraham Maslow later called self-actualization. Furthermore, he contemplated all of the above with the included addition of the spiritual and transpersonal dimension. This is why psychosynthesis is considered a precursor to humanistic and transpersonal psychology.

Roberto Assagioli after the war

The Second World War was an especially difficult period for Assagioli, due to his Jewish origin and his humanist ideas.. He spent time imprisoned and isolated, a time in which he took the opportunity to carry out studies on the will, meditation and research into the different internal areas of consciousness.

It seems that The experiences during the war considerably affected his health.. Even so, after the war, Assagioli returned to work on his research and maintained contact with people who significantly influenced his work, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Viktor Frankl and Alice A. Bailey.

Besides, To all his research work he also added a deep knowledge of Hindu philosophy and Buddhism, since he studied for a time with a Tibetan lama.

His life was the best example of his teachings. He showed great respect and love for human beings and the goodness that resides in all individuals. Everyone who knew him remembered him as a person who radiated joy and love and who enjoyed great inner peace.

During the 1970s and 1980s, psychosynthesis spread throughout Europe and North America.. Numerous schools were created that trained professionals in this specialty. Currently, it can be studied as a master’s degree at two institutes in the city of London.

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