Roberto Assagioli (1888 — 1974) — Italian psychoanalyst, founder of psychosynthesis. The concept of personality in psychosynthesis differs from psychoanalytic, although it partially correlates with it. Assagioli considers six components of the psyche: the lower unconscious (instinctive impulses, passions, primitive desires, etc.); the middle unconscious (thoughts, feelings that can be easily realized, an analogue of the Freudian preconscious); higher unconscious, or superconscious, superconsciousness (higher feelings and abilities, intuition, inspiration); field of consciousness — analyzed feelings, thoughts, impulses; conscious self — «I» — a point of clear awareness; the higher self is a kind of «inner God». Practicing psychosynthesis allows you to achieve perfection. The Russian reader is familiar with his fundamental research «Psychosynthesis».
Foreword by Yuri Klyuchnikov
From the preface by Yuri Klyuchnikov to the article «Nervous Diseases in Spiritual Growth»
Roberto Assagioli is widely known in Europe as a physician-philosopher, the creator of the technique of personality reconstruction, which he called «psychosynthesis». The starting point for Assagioli is the desire to penetrate into the spiritual center of a person, into that area that is designated by religious and Eastern philosophical doctrines as the higher Self of human individuality, as the Superconsciousness. Not taking into account the supraconscious and spiritual aspects that psychology left before philosophy and religion created a painful gap, and often a conflict, between different approaches to human nature. Sigmund Freud tried to overcome this gap, but his healing and then philosophical concepts reduced human nature to the subconscious, to sexual complexes. Jung, Fromm and Assagioli, relying on the Vedantic tradition, were able to enrich the European science of man with more fruitful approaches.
Roberto Assagioli drew his ideas of psychosynthesis not only from Vedanta texts. In 1940, arrested by the fascist authorities of Italy, he spent about a month in solitary confinement and subsequently told his friends that it was an interesting and valuable experience that gave him the opportunity to conduct a series of special psycho-spiritual exercises. Assagioli used his forced retreat in 1943 just as effectively, when he was hiding from the Mussolini regime in remote mountain villages.
Assagioli is a doctor, his specialty is the treatment of nervous diseases that have arisen as a result of the spiritual advancement of people. But the phrase illness and spiritual growth seems to look strange — why such growth, if it is accompanied by illness? Indeed, the majority of nervous diseases arise not as a result of spiritual ascent, but as a result of its curvature. Assagioli does not say how difficult and long-term «psycho-synthetic» treatment is, meanwhile, elementary prevention makes it possible to avoid very many psychological traps. And above all, the categorical non-admission of the forcible intrusion of anyone and anything into the human psychosphere. The so-called extrasensory perception is not at all a goal and not a merit, but, by inevitability, a painful companion of our spiritual growth — controlled if we strive to join the Divine World and dangerously uncontrolled if our aspirations are connected with the Subtle World.