A Psychology with a Soul

Psychosynthesis in Evolutionary Context

Jean Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317203407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie existentielle

A comprehensive approach to self-realization, psychosynthesis was developed between 1910 and the 1950s by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli. Assagioli like Jung, diverged from Freud in order to develop an understanding of human nature that took account of spiritual dimensions. This book, originally published in 1987, is an exploration of psychosynthesis and the depth of mystical and scientific ideas behind it. It will be of great value to all those interested in personal integration and spiritual growth in general, and psychosynthesis in particular.

Focusing on psychosynthesis as transpersonal psychology, Jean Hardy describes how the ideas behind psychosynthesis spring both from scientific study of the unconscious and from the long mystical tradition of both the Easter and Western world. She shows how the roots of a modern spiritual, or transpersonal, psychology lie in a split tradition within the Western world – while psychology aspires to be scientific, religion or mystical knowledge is currently studied within the discipline of theology. The two have up till now been very little related, and the special achievement of psychosynthesis as a therapy is that it relates the soul and theology to the personality and psychology, and perceives personal and developmental patterns as a microcosm of larger social and historical patterns.

II
The Split between Scientific and Religious Knowledge

Introduction

In the first part of this study we saw some of the themes that spring from an account of key areas of psychosynthesis theory. There is the idea that fragmentation of conscious and more particularly unconscious material can dominate an individual’s development, and that such a fragmentation may dominate the development of the human race as a whole. It is in first recognizing and then working through the most disabling aspects of the person, in the light of a spiritual context, that the negative and destructive may become more related to an integrating centre, the ‘I’. The unconscious may become more known: the spiritual unconscious may become more available.

Much of this unconscious material is known, not only through observations and empirical study, but also through myths and symbols which have long traditions in many societies. There are several kinds of subjective and objective knowledge, which both a therapist and a client may use. And it may be that the destruction in the individual, and in the world, is based in unlived potential, in the fragmentation and accretion which is the sign of a lack of awareness and of not yet being able to cope with this potential. In Assagioli’s view, these unconscious forces can be recognized and worked with, in the light of both spiritual consciousness and scientific methods and techniques becoming newly available. But at the present time the outward split between the disciplines of scientific knowledge and religious experience is a reflection of an inward split between these two kinds of ‘knowing’ in the individual. Fragmentation is present at many levels.

In Part Two, I trace the split development of scientific and religious/mystical thinking as it comes to be experienced and perceived in our present society. This is taken back to the relationship of these two modes of knowing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, which is described in Chapter 8. But to trace the religious and spiritual influences on Assagioli, it is necessary to go back much further; Chapter 9 examines the nature of mysticism through twenty centuries, and Chapters 10 to 14 examine the particular Western schools most relevant to this search. Plato and Dante were life-long influences on Assagioli: the gnostic, neoplatonic and Jewish mystical schools, combined with Eastern mysticism, were the foundation of Theosophy and of Jung’s framework of knowledge – one that was close to psychosynthesis. Also, it is clear from his library and from his writing, both published and unpublished, that Assagioli had an extensive knowledge of and interest in world spiritual thought. Much of this material came together around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries in an upsurge of interest in both Eastern and Western religious wisdom and knowledge, and this is examined in Chapter 15.

When psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy began to develop in the late nineteenth century, it sprang largely from the scientific tradition and from clinical practice. In psychotherapy in particular, the interest was in the study of unconscious material, which for the first time in history was studied scientifically and systematically. These movements are the subjects of Chapters 16 and 17.

Thus in the second Part of the book I am tracing the roots of what originally seemed to me the extraordinary ideas of psychosynthesis. I had wondered where these ideas came from: what were the sources of Assagioli’s certainty? Why was his psychology so different from that taught in universities today?

Part II contains my guesses in answer to these questions.

8
The split development of scientific and mystical thinking over the last four hundred years

In the following section, the development of mystical thought particularly relevant to psychosynthesis will be traced over many centuries, up to the time that Assagioli started writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Assagioli was also a doctor and a psychiatrist, based in the scientific tradition. In asking about the origin of the ideas contained in psychosynthesis, and the nature of the knowledge that it embraces, it is necessary to examine the relationship of mystical to scientific knowledge, because that is the tension within psychosynthesis and indeed within any transpersonal psychotherapy.

It is not possible to do this without going back again into historical material. The roots of this tension lie in what has been seen as ‘knowledge’ in the last four hundred years in the West, and the massive change not only in the nature of our knowledge but also in how we think of it.

Science and the scientific method have been seen in this period in the West as the way to truly objective knowledge. The science that is the basis of modern Western culture is inductive – in other words, it is based on observation and experimentation and is sceptical: from the observations made, generalizations and laws are created but are always subject to query. This method was first used in relation to the natural sciences, particularly astronomy, physics and chemistry, and has developed through the great technological discoveries that have transformed our lives. It assumes that the observer, the scientist, is objective and value-free: anyone performing the same process would come up with the same results. It is also based on a premise of growth and of control – the more we can find out, the more power and control we can have over the nature of things, and the more the human race can develop. This assumption has been carried over from the natural sciences to the social sciences, into the study of the individual in psychology, developed in the late nineteenth century, and of society through sociology, first developed in the nineteenth century by Comte.

The part of the scientific observer in this process has, however, been pondered over by many philosophers of science: what any scientist perceives depends on the questions he or she asks and the structure of thought that that scientist takes to a particular problem. This point was made by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in opposition to the eighteenth century conviction of the validity of rationality. Scientific knowledge, he maintained, is not about a system of rules that governs reality, but a man-made artefact, useful as far as it goes but no further. In science we are not so much discovering ‘truth’ as constructing pictures of reality from the human brain – a picture that is created by the structure of the brain. We can understand the ‘world’ because we ourselves have created it.

This has remained a counter-idea to the widespread belief in the ultimate truth of science through the centuries since then, particularly by phenomenologists. Modern science can be seen not only as a continuous accretion of new knowledge about the nature of things, but also as a huge metaphor or myth – perhaps the myth of our age and of the last four hundred years. It works within its own framework and boundaries, just as any myth does: but science may also be a restriction on our knowledge if we think it can account for all our reality. Vico maintained that it was:

a perverse kind of self-denial to apply the rules and laws of physics or of any other natural sciences to the world of mind and will and feeling; for by doing this we would be gratuitously debarring ourselves from much that we could know.^35:96

The idea of science as a creation of human reality has been taken further by a contemporary historian of ideas, Thomas Kuhn, in his well-known book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was first published in 1962. Kuhn maintains that at any one time there is an accepted picture of scientific reality which he calls a paradigm – for instance, Ptolemaic astronomy. This is the pattern of ‘conventional routinized practice’ upon which all scientists of the time work, and is related to a set of models about the nature of the world which all the practitioners can accept and develop. Eventually, the practitioners will begin to discover more and more anomalies and exceptions, and gradually the paradigm will be questioned – often against the considerable opposition not only of the scientific community but of the society at large: this occurred, for instance, in relation to Copernicus’s astronomy in the sixteenth century and to Darwin’s theories of evolution in the nineteenth, both of which questioned contemporary religious and spiritual as well as scientific pictures of the nature of the universe and of the human race within it. This bursting of the paradigm and creation of a new one is the scientific revolution referred to in the title of the book. And then, as Kuhn states, ‘though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.,^147:121 He maintains, as Vico also did, that the assumptions of a particular paradigm are likely to be incompatible with those of another: knowledge does not simply build up incrementally bit by bit, but is in competition with other kinds of knowledge in other paradigms. As Vico wrote, each society creates its own unique vision: it was not that the rationality of the scientific society in his own day was superior to other societies in some absolute way, it was simply governed by a different set of values, and the world was seen through different eyes. The Western world may have lost much as well as gained much by the predominance of the scientific and technological mode of thinking.

Science in our culture is the pre-eminent mode of ‘knowing’. The validity of knowledge in universities is governed by the test of objectivity, of evidence, of the quoting of authorities, of openness.

Mystical and religious knowledge, on the other hand, is presently regarded with a good deal of suspicion. Science in general assumes that the nature of reality is material – and in any case that is science’s only true domain because it is not possible to test mystery and spirituality. Religion in its personal form is the experience of the spiritual. Jung maintains that religion is about the transcendental. But the difficulty here is that not only is the knowledge personal, not open, it is also interior, untestable. It is likely to relate to a conviction about the nature of the universe that is taken to be absolutely true, but untestable. It deals in belief and conviction, and in subjective knowledge: and from this belief, ways of action are deduced. The assumption is that the universe is not basically material but spiritual, and that is the greater reality. And an assumption of the importance of spirituality may impose restrictions of human curiosity that the scientist as such is unwilling to abide by. On the whole, spiritual knowledge, such as that traced in this earlier section of Part Two, is based on completely different assumptions from those of science and technology. The two live in the modern world uneasily together. Science is the more powerful mode by far, though it is recognized by most people that the great hope for human progress held so fervently in the nineteenth century through science has met with disillusion. Religion, and particularly mysticism, is generally suspect and marginal.

Both science and conventional religions have built up strong institutions. The different churches can be seen to represent the religious impulse, but as Jung indicates, churches are ‘codified and dogmatised forms of religious experience. The contents of the experience have become sanctified and usually congealed in a rigid, often elaborate structure’.^133:6 Similarly, scientific interest groups have developed, heavily financially backed by powerful elites in society (as is also the case among established religion). Science in particular is buttressed and supported by national and international companies, universities, professions, and the developed expectations of the population. Knowledge held to be ‘real’ is by no means a neutral matter, but involves the power of definition of how the society ought to be run, and what values should underlie it.

To look at the origin of the scientific world we know now, we need to go back to the sixteenth century, at the time of a major scientific revolution which changed the way people saw the nature of things.

In 1500 educated people in Western Europe believed themselves living in the centre of a finite cosmos, at the mercy of supernatural forces beyond their control, and certainly continually menaced by Satan and all his allies. By 1700 educated people in Western Europe for the most part believed themselves living in an infinite universe on a tiny planet in (elliptical) orbit round the sun, no longer menaced by Satan, and confident that power over the natural world lay within their grasp.^67:1

This latter picture is not so different, with modifications, from the picture most people have of the nature of reality today. This quotation indicates the power and relativity of the basic assumptions with which people at different historical periods lead their lives.

The earlier religious world view was Christian and was encapsulated in the picture of the Great Chain of Being, described on page 112 – a spiritual, hierarchical image of reality which related matter to spirit throughout the world, from rocks and worms to the highest God, and seeing Good and Evil as separate, powerful forces at work in the world. The only attempt that could then be made in such circumstances to control the world was through magic, including alchemy; magic was arguably the forerunner of our modern science – Francis Bacon called his own science ‘natural magic’. The differences in the practices of religion and magic were brought out in relation to this earlier period by Keith Thomas:

The essential difference between the prayers of a churchman and the spells of a magician was that only the latter claimed to work automatically; a prayer had no certainty of success and would not be granted if God chose not to concede it. A spell, on the other hand, need never go wrong, unless some detail of ritual observation had been omitted or a rival magician had been practising stronger counter-magic. A prayer, in other words, was a form of supplication: a spell was a mechanical means of manipulation.^225:46

The power sought in magic was similar to the power based in science today.

But in the sixteenth century the two were not yet divided. Robert Fludd, for instance, who lived in England from 1574 to 1637, could attempt to write down the whole of human knowledge. He first wrote of the macrocosm, the external world of nature: then of ...