Growing whole will cause conflict and pain, but it can also activate your Will to Synthesis if you insist on being you!
By Kenneth Sørensen, MA, Psychosynthesis Psychotherapist and Researcher. Published August 2026. (This article is based on the e-book Conflict, Crises and Synthesis, a compilation of articles by Roberto Assagioli. You can download it here). Assagioli’s quote in the image is from Psychosynthesis and Psychotherapy (II)
Abstract
Why does psychological and spiritual growth so often involve conflict, crisis, and pain? Drawing on Roberto Assagioli’s writings, this article explores suffering as an inherent dimension of human development rather than simply a sign that something has gone wrong. It examines the conflicts that arise between different levels and needs within the personality, Assagioli’s distinction between progressive and regressive responses to crisis, and his understanding of pain as a potential catalyst for awakening, detachment, self-reflection, and transformation. Central to this process is the will: our capacity to assume responsibility, make conscious choices, and move toward a more authentic expression of ourselves despite resistance and uncertainty. From a psychosynthesis perspective, the aim is therefore not to eliminate conflict but to transform it through an ongoing process of synthesis, integrating our diverse psychological and spiritual energies around a conscious center and a meaningful direction in life.
There is a question that sits at the heart of Psychosynthesis, one that practitioners encounter again and again in the consulting room and in their own inner lives: why does growth hurt? Why is it that the moment we decide to become more of who we truly are — to follow a deeper calling, to leave behind what no longer serves us, to step into an unfamiliar version of ourselves — we are met not with ease but with resistance, fear, and very often, pain?
Psychosynthesis offers a disarmingly direct answer. Conflict and pain are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are, as Roberto Assagioli consistently maintained, endemic to the evolution of consciousness itself. They are baked into the structure of growth. And once we understand why, the way we relate to our own suffering begins to change.
Conflict Is Woven Into Evolution
Assagioli mapped the human being as a field of energies operating across multiple levels — instinctual, emotional, mental, and superconscious — each with its own needs, drives, and logic. These levels do not coexist peacefully. They collide. As he wrote:
“Within us there is a constant bumping and clashing of various elements, of the various tendencies within us, of heterogeneous and contradictory elements that all of them want to live, assert themselves and express themselves.”[1]
This is not pathology. It is the normal condition of a complex being in the process of becoming. The infant’s instincts clash with the demands of adult responsibility. The ego’s appetite for comfort and security clashes with the soul’s hunger for meaning. The personality’s familiar patterns of self-protection clash with the superconscious energies pressing for a wider expression. At each threshold of development, something in us resists what is trying to emerge. And that resistance is not an obstacle to growth — it is part of the mechanism by which growth occurs.
Assagioli aligned this vision with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, placing basic drives in the lower unconscious, personal needs for love, esteem, and self-actualisation in the middle unconscious, and the deeper hunger for meaning and transcendence in the superconscious. As we move upward through these levels, the conflicts do not disappear — they become more refined, more demanding, and in some ways more costly. Every genuine advance in consciousness requires leaving something behind. However, as Ken Wilber points out in relation to pain and evolution, it hurts more as we evolve, but it bothers us less. As we evolve, we take greater responsibility for humanity’s suffering as our empathy widens, but we learn to disidentify from it.
You Cannot Avoid Pain — Only Choose Which Kind
This is perhaps the most unflinching insight Psychosynthesis offers, and one of the most liberating: we cannot avoid pain. We can only choose what kind of pain we are willing to accept.
The person who refuses to take the risk of a new career, a new relationship, or a new self-understanding does not thereby escape suffering. They exchange the pain of growth for the pain of stagnation — the quiet, grinding suffering of a life that is smaller than it could be. Conversely, the person who chooses to move forward — to learn something new, to take on greater responsibility, to follow a deeper truth — accepts a different kind of pain: the discomfort of the unfamiliar, the friction of transformation, the fear of the unknown.
Assagioli described this with characteristic precision. Pain, he argued, has four genuinely beneficial functions. It shakes us from inertia and laziness. It loosens our grip on attachments that have begun to limit us. It compels us to discipline and organise our inner energies. And it turns our attention inward, initiating the kind of reflection that opens onto deeper questions of meaning and purpose:
“Pain jolts us, making us ‘re-enter into ourselves’, arresting our breathless pace and turning our attention inwards and upwards. Thus we commence really to think, to put the great problems of life to ourselves, to discover their justification, understand their significance, and intuit their purpose and goal.”[2]
This is not a counsel of masochism. Assagioli was equally clear that pain must always be a means toward a positive outcome, never an end in itself.[3] But he refused the modern consolation that the right method, the right therapist, or the right spiritual practice will eventually deliver us from suffering altogether. What they can deliver is something more valuable: the capacity to meet suffering consciously, to understand its function, and to extract what it offers.
The Progressive and Regressive Response
Not all pain moves us forward. Assagioli drew a crucial distinction between regressive and progressive symptoms — a distinction that every practitioner needs to hold clearly in mind.
Regressive symptoms arise when we are unable or unwilling to meet the developmental demands of our current stage. The person who cannot face the responsibilities of adult life, who retreats into illness or victimhood or blame, is not avoiding pain — they are incurring a different and ultimately more corrosive kind. Assagioli was unsparing on this point:
“Nowadays, there is often a tendency to blame the environment or society. Society certainly has its faults, but not all those attributed to it by those who use it as an escape and a justification for their own deficiencies.”[4]
Progressive symptoms, by contrast, arise precisely because we are outgrowing the current stage. A loss of motivation, a sense of emptiness, a restless dissatisfaction with what previously felt sufficient — these are not signs of breakdown but of an emerging readiness for something new. They are the growing pains of a consciousness that is pressing against its current boundaries.
The difficulty is that the two can look remarkably similar from the outside — and sometimes from the inside. Depression can be regressive or progressive. Anxiety can signal retreat or approaching breakthrough. The practitioner’s art lies partly in discerning which kind of suffering is present, because the appropriate response to each is entirely different.
Taking Responsibility: The Will as the Path Forward
If conflict and pain are built into the structure of evolution, the question becomes: what do we do with them? Psychosynthesis offers a clear answer, and it centres on the development of will and the assumption of personal responsibility. Something I have explored in the article What Is Free Will? (https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/what-is-free-will/)
Assagioli was emphatic that personal responsibility is not a burden imposed from outside but the very condition of genuine freedom. In his interview with Sam Keen, he stated:
“In Psychosynthesis we stress individual responsibility. No matter what has happened to a person, he must assume responsibility here and now for changes he wants to make in his personality and not blame his parents or society. I am against many things in modern society and am a revolutionary in that sense but we have to change it from within because it is our society… we are conditioned by the past but we have the power to disown it, to walk away, to change ourselves.”[5]
This is a radical claim, and a demanding one. It does not deny that we have been shaped by our histories, our families, our wounds. It insists, rather, that at some point — and that point is always now — we are capable of becoming the authors of our own forward movement. The will is the faculty that makes this possible.
In Psychosynthesis, will is not willpower in the crude sense of forcing ourselves to do what we resist. It is the capacity to choose, consciously and deliberately, which aspect of ourselves we act from, which values we align with, and which direction we move toward. It is what allows us to say: I see the fear, I feel the resistance, and I choose to move forward anyway — not because the pain will be absent, but because what lies ahead is more aligned with who I authentically am.
This choice is grounded in self-knowledge. We cannot make genuinely free choices without understanding our own psychological type, our authentic values, our genuine talents, and the difference between what we have been conditioned to want and what we actually need. This is why Psychosynthesis places such emphasis on the work of disidentification and self-observation — not as ends in themselves, but as the foundation from which a truly willed life becomes possible.
Synthesis as the Ongoing Task
The goal, ultimately, is not the elimination of conflict but its transformation into synthesis — the ongoing process of integrating the conflicting energies of our inner life into an ever-more-coherent whole. Assagioli used the healthy body as his model: in a body functioning well, countless distinct cells, organs, and systems cooperate toward the single purpose of sustaining life. They do not cease to be distinct — they become organised around a directing centre and purpose.
The same task faces us psychologically and spiritually. The instincts, the emotions, the mind, the will, the superconscious energies — none of these is to be suppressed or discarded. They are to be acknowledged, developed, and brought into a conscious relationship with the directing centre of the self. This is the work of a lifetime. It has no final destination. But it has a direction: toward greater authenticity, greater freedom, and greater capacity to act from what is most essentially true in us.
Conflict, then, is not the enemy of this journey. It is its engine. And pain, rightly understood and consciously met, is not a sign that we are failing — it is often the signal that we are finally, genuinely, growing.
[1]Roberto Assagioli, Conflicts, Crises, and Synthesis, compiled by Kenneth Sørensen (kennethsorensen.dk, 2023), 56.
[2]Assagioli, Conflicts, Crises, and Synthesis, 151.
[3]Assagioli, Conflicts, Crises, and Synthesis, 151.
[4]Assagioli, Conflicts, Crises, and Synthesis, 47.
[5]Sam Keen, “The Golden Mean of Roberto Assagioli,” Psychology Today, December 1974. https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/the-golden-mean-of-roberto-assagioli/
Bibliography
Assagioli, Roberto. The Act of Will. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
Assagioli, Roberto. Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis. London: Crucible, 1991. Reprint, Smyrna: Smyrna Press, 2007.
Assagioli, Roberto. Conflicts, Crises, and Synthesis. Compiled and introduced by Kenneth Sørensen. Oslo: kennethsorensen.dk, 2023. https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/product/conflicts-crises-and-synthesis/
Keen, Sam. “The Golden Mean of Roberto Assagioli.” Psychology Today, December 1974. https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/the-golden-mean-of-roberto-assagioli/
Sørensen, Kenneth. The Soul of Psychosynthesis: The Seven Core Concepts. Kentaur Publishing, 2015.
