Height Psychology
By Kenneth Sørensen, MA Psychosynthesis
Height Psychology is Roberto Assagioli’s name for the scientific study of the higher reaches of the human psyche — the superconscious or higher unconscious, peak experiences, intuition, inspiration, the experience of the Self, and the modalities through which transpersonal energies enter ordinary waking consciousness. Assagioli proposed the term as the necessary complement to depth psychology: where depth psychology investigates the lower unconscious of repression, drives, and complexes, Height Psychology investigates what lies above the field of ordinary awareness. The two together, integrated with the psychology of everyday consciousness, form what Assagioli called “a three-dimensional, synthetic psychology.”[1] In an interview with Beverly Besmer in Height Psychology — Discovering the Self and the Self, he lays out all the implications of the word.
Origin of the term
Assagioli used the term across the last decade of his life, in published articles, lectures, and interviews. He explicitly disclaimed originality, attributing earlier use to the Austrian psychiatrist Igor A. Caruso and “others.”[2] What Assagioli did was give the term a sharper definition, a fuller theoretical scaffolding, and a place within the larger framework of psychosynthesis. The earliest first-person occurrence in his published Italian work is dated 1967; the term recurs in interviews and articles through 1974, the year of his death.
The American Esalen co-founder Stuart Miller, who collaborated with Assagioli in the early 1970s, helped introduce the term in English. Miller’s October 1972 Intellectual Digest piece is the earliest dated public English surfacing of the depth/height pair: “Assagioli argues that we need a ‘height psychology’ as well as a ‘depth psychology.’”[3]
Why “height” rather than “depth” alone
Assagioli’s critique of conventional twentieth-century psychology was that it had become two-and-a-half dimensional. Surface psychology gave the two dimensions of ordinary conscious life. Depth psychology added the downward direction toward the lower unconscious. But the upward dimension — toward the superconscious, intuition, and the Self — had been systematically neglected. As Assagioli put it in conversation with the journalist Mariella Crocellà in 1968:
“Depth psychology, or psychoanalysis in a general sense — dynamic psychology — is insufficient, because it is directed only ‘downward’; one could call it a two-and-a-half dimension psychology. The whole upward dimension, toward the superconscious and the spirit, has been neglected.”[4]
The architectural image he offered the same year is one of his most vivid:
“Until recently only the exploration and cleaning of the cellars of the human edifice received the most attention. Then the area of investigation was extended upward to include even the dwellings, the sphere of the ‘ego;’ and now finally investigators have reached the terraces at the summit, where the owner can rejoice in the life-giving rays of the spiritual sun and contemplate the stars at night. The Self begins to receive recognition and become the subject of attention.”[5]
What Height Psychology studies
The subject matter of Height Psychology, as Assagioli set it out, includes:
- The superconscious or higher unconscious — the level “beyond” the field of ordinary consciousness, source of artistic, ethical, and religious inspiration, and of the experience of meaning and value
- Peak experiences and unitive states — Maslow’s term, which Assagioli adopted for the phenomenology of higher consciousness
- Higher psychological functions — intuition, illumination, inspiration, revelation, creation
- The transpersonal Self — the experiential reality that is reflected in the personal “I” and that grounds psychosynthesis
- The eight paths to the Self — religious-devotional-mystical, ethical-regenerative, aesthetic, social-humanitarian-heroic, scientific-philosophical, ritualistic-ceremonial, the path of the will, and the transcendent way
- The descent of transpersonal energies — how superconscious contents and energies pass into ordinary waking consciousness, and the practical means and techniques by which this passage can be facilitated[6]
Higher and lower as stages of development
A common objection to Height Psychology has been that the language of “high” and “low” smuggles in moral judgments incompatible with scientific neutrality. Assagioli answered this objection directly in the introduction to his unfinished book:
“‘Low’ and ‘high’ can, and often do, designate simply a stage of development. … A child is lower in stature than an adult; a child is at a less evolved stage of development than an adult. But that does not mean at all that the adult, as such, is ‘better’ or ‘superior’ to the child. Both from the psychological and the moral standpoint, a healthy child is better or superior to a neurotic adult. The existence of these different stages of development is an incontrovertible fact.”[7]
He went further on the methodological question. A purely objective psychology that excludes values, he argued, is not genuinely scientific:
“It has been objected that the word ‘high’ implies moral valuations which are extraneous to objective science. However a purely objective psychology in this sense is not valid, because values are psychological facts. They have to be taken into account in an inclusive psychology, an inclusive study of human nature.”[8]
The unfinished book
In June 1974, two months before his death, Assagioli announced his planned synthesis of the field:
“This field has occupied my attention for many years, and I am now (June 1974) engaged on the task of coordinating and systematizing my personal contribution to the field in a book to be called Height Psychology and the Self.”[9]
The book was never completed. Part One was published posthumously in heavily edited form as Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis (Smiling Wisdom, 2007), but the published volume omits substantial material from Assagioli’s plan — most notably his treatment of the eight paths to the Self — and Part Two, which Assagioli himself called “the self book,” was never published in book form. The surviving outline, draft passages, and source preparations remain in the Archivio Assagioli in Florence. He discusses several of the topics in his forthcoming book in a conversation just before his death: Roberto Assagioli and Psychosynthesis (Miller interview).
Related concepts
Height Psychology stands alongside, and in productive tension with, depth psychology, the psychology of the will, and the broader transpersonal psychology of which Assagioli regarded it as one branch. It is the necessary upper third of the three-dimensional, synthetic psychology Assagioli was working toward at the end of his life.
[1]Roberto Assagioli, “Transpersonal Inspiration — The Various Types of Inspiration,” Part I, Psychosynthesis Research Foundation Reprint No. 36 (1976), based on Assagioli’s text dated June 1974.
[2]Roberto Assagioli, “The Multiplicities Within The Human Being,” lecture transcript, Monday 12 August (year unknown), Archivio Assagioli, Firenze. Assagioli credits prior use of the term “Height-psychology” to Igor A. Caruso “and others” outside the Freudian school.
[3]Stuart Miller, editorial introduction to “The Will,” interview with Roberto Assagioli, Intellectual Digest (October 1972).
[4]Roberto Assagioli, in conversation with Mariella Crocellà, Nazione, 21 February 1968. Archivio Assagioli, Firenze, Doc. #23493. Translation by Jan Kuniholm.
[5]Roberto Assagioli, “Psychology in the Future” (La Psicologia Nell’Avvenire), 1968. Archivio Assagioli, Firenze, Doc. #23977. Translation by Jan Kuniholm.
[6]From Assagioli’s proposed table of contents for Height Psychology and the Self, as published in “Transpersonal Inspiration,” PRF Reprint No. 36 (1976). The seven paths listed in that table of contents are the religious-devotional-mystical, ethical-regenerative, aesthetic, social-humanitarian-heroic, scientific-philosophical, ritualistic-ceremonial, and the path of the will. Assagioli identifies an eighth way — the transcendent way — in further articles on transpersonal realisation.
[7]Roberto Assagioli, excerpted by Beverly Besmer from the Introduction to the forthcoming Height Psychology and the Self, in “Height Psychology — Discovering the self and the Self,” interview, Interpersonal Development 4 (1973/4): 215–225.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Assagioli, “Transpersonal Inspiration,” PRF Reprint No. 36.
