An interview with Roberto Assagioli by Stuart Miller, the first Vice President of Development at Esalen Institute
By Stuart Miller . The Assagioli Archives lists the date of this interview, which is Doc. #24343, as 1972. Internal evidence supports this, because the end note of the published interview lists Assagioli’s book The Act of Will, as “an Esalen book, The Viking Press, to be published in Spring, 1973.” – Oath.
References to Assagioli’s books and to several psychosynthesis centers that are no longer in operation were appended to the interview. – Oath.
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Abstract
In this in-depth interview, Roberto Assagioli discusses the foundations, aims, and practical applications of psychosynthesis. Responding to questions by Stuart Miller , Assagioli addresses key themes such as the Self, the will, psychological synthesis, spiritual development, and the integration of personality. The interview provides a primary-source articulation of psychosynthesis from its founder, clarifying its psychological and transpersonal dimensions.
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Stuart Miller: What is Psychosynthesis?
Roberto Assagioli: It is not a technique. That’s clear. Nor is it a specific psychological theory or a philosophy. Pragmatic in spirit, psychosynthesis includes techniques, makes some important theoretical statements, and remains carefully less than systematic. It is an open-ended approach to taking into account all the known facts about man’s inner life. In a sense, as I make clear in my personal statement, psychosynthesis with a small “p” is a natural process, something that is going on all the time, and Psychosynthesis with a capital “P” is just the sum of all the information we have about how to enhance and accelerate that process.
Stuart Miller: What process are you talking about?
Roberto Assagioli: I mean the process of the harmonization of personality. Two of the key concepts of psychosynthesis are the Self and the personal functions. The idea of harmonizing the personality is an old one, but put here into modern psychological language.
Stuart Miller: Much of Assagioli’s contribution is just that, updating our understanding of old and sometimes lost notions. By the Self, Assagioli means, first of all, the core of the personality; what Freud, himself, called the ego; what comes to mind when we say “I.” For Assagioli, it is, above everything, the experience of self-awareness.
Roberto Assagioli: We go to sleep at night and this experience disappears. We awake, and we’ve suddenly got it back. Now, part of the problems we all have is accounted for by the fact that we forget our Selves, too often, while we are awake. We identify with the contents of our consciousness or with roles.
Stuart Miller: Why is that so bad?
Roberto Assagioli: It isn’t bad, necessarily, but it can and frequently does get us into trouble. To take a simple example, instead of identifying himself with himself, a businessman can identify himself with the role of being a businessman. So he comes to feel that his very Self depends on his being successful, his very identity. That is, of course, an illusion. His Self is his, he exists, the fault is in not remembering. But you see businessmen who forget so much that they drive themselves to ulcers and even to suicide. Remember the bankrupt millionaires who dived out of windows during the Crash of ’29. They forgot who they were. Trouble is that so many of us are so attached to identifying with parts of our personalities that we forget our Selves: we become the student, the mother, the child, the gambler, the lover. That’s all right for us when things are going well, but it’s terrible when things go badly.
Stuart Miller: It sounds like you are talking about a fundamental issue of human freedom.
Roberto Assagioli: Yes. The Self is the locus of human freedom. Remember your Self, stay conscious of the experience of self-awareness and you are free to meet life.
Stuart Miller: To Assagioli, this is basic, and it frequently brings him to use the image of the orchestra conductor.
Roberto Assagioli: If one can operate from his self-conscious center, remembering who he is, then he can use the various elements of his personality. Instead of letting them use him. So one can choose to be the teacher or the lover or the businessman at will, and turn those roles off, at will.
Stuart Miller: How does one learn how to do that? It sounds easy to say but hard to achieve.
Stuart Miller: It is hard, and one shouldn’t be deceived in reading Assagioli into thinking that what he talks about can be easily achieved. He himself says that just because he tries to write about these things simply doesn’t mean that they are simple to achieve.
Roberto Assagioli: On the other hand, they aren’t that complicated or hard. I mean that we have found that a little bit of regular effort, even a few minutes a day, can pay enormous dividends. One place to start is simply by learning first to recognize and then to disidentify from everything but the Self: emotions, the body, your thoughts, all the roles. A lot of people think, for example, that they are their thoughts, but a moment of introspection will show them that there is somebody behind their thoughts. I mean that each of us can observe his thoughts. So, who is the observer? The Self, of course.
Stuart Miller: Learning to self-identify can provide the basis for becoming the conductor of the orchestra of the personality. (One diagram that Assagioli uses may help here.)
The self, at the center, can gradually disentangle itself from the other personality functions and learn to control and harmonize them.
In this way, for instance, instead of being a victim of one’s emotions, one can learn to dominate them. Thus, one can be angry at will, or even happy, at will.
Stuart Miller: I’m amazed to hear all this talk about controlling emotions, and even about control in general. After all, if Esalen has become famous for any one thing it is the wisdom of giving up control, of letting go.
Roberto Assagioli: This is a subtle matter and pretty complicated, but I’ll try to give you a brief answer. One problem which many people have in our society, and one reason why many come to Esalen, is that they are too controlled. So many of them say that they can’t feel and they want to learn how. Others say that their bodies are too tight and they want to let go. Still others say they think too much and they want to get out of their heads.
They are right, of course; they are controlled. But it is not they, not their Selves, which is doing the controlling, Instead, it is their identification with one or another psychological role or function. The over-intellectualized engineer who comes to Esalen saying he wants to “get out of his head” is controlled by certain aspects of his mind and by the sub-personality that identifies him with functional thinking. In the star diagram, he would be all mind and the other functions would be tiny shadows; the Self would be outside the diagram altogether. So, the first thing he must learn is that he has feelings, that he has imagination, and so on. That he is more complete than he thinks. To learn that he must allow the thinking sub-personality controlling him to let go of him. In the process, a curious thing happens: people become conscious not only of unused psychological functions, they also become conscious of personal power, of themselves. So, the first stage is release from outer control, then self-identification, then development in a harmonious way of all the powers we have.
Stuart Miller: This is all so conscious, so premeditated. Doesn’t Assagioli recognize the unconscious and all its demons? Definitely. In fact, Assagioli was one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Italy, in 1910. He knew Freud, personally, and was a co-worker of Jung. And he believes that the unconscious is one of the great discoveries of modern psychology. However, he has a wonderfully broad-gauge understanding of the unconscious. Freud and most of his followers in psychoanalysis emphasized the lower aspects of the unconscious: animal drives and so forth. Assagioli believes that there are, roughly speaking, three levels of the unconscious. He uses another diagram to illustrate this.
Roberto Assagioli: The lower unconscious, Number 1, is what Freud mostly talked about. It is the primitive man, both individually and as a species. The middle unconscious is all that we are unconscious of in everyday life—for example, the thoughts and images flashing through our minds and imaginations, errands we can remember to do or may forget, and so on. The higher unconscious, however, is relatively unexplored by modern psychology and it is also a strong ally, if mobilized, in the process of making ourselves into all we want to be. The superconscious, or higher unconscious, is the source of artistic inspiration, of ethical inspiration, of religious experience, of moral inspiration. And it can seem to be even outside of us. So poets traditionally refer to the Muse as the source of their inspiration.
One of the things that a lot of people have been waking up to in our culture is that the superconscious can be cultivated, that ways can be found to bring its contents down, out into the open. A lot of the enthusiasm for various meditative techniques, inner imagery work, and creativity training comes from this realization. By evoking these higher energies — some call them “trans-personal” — one gains a strong ally in the process of synthesizing one’s personality.
Stuart Miller: It still sounds a little facile. What about the Freudian demons, the dark forces within us? Are they ignored?
Roberto Assagioli: Not at all. In practice, Psychosynthesis, when practiced by an educator or a therapist, begins with an “analytic” phase. In the sense of “psychoanalytic.” By that is meant that one attempts to analyze the blockages to personal development and then to analyze their causes. One might even use the techniques of classical analysis: free association and so forth. However, one is not limited to Freudian techniques in dealing with blockages. Many active techniques can be used to give perspective on and freedom from a childhood problem with a parent, for example. So, one can use not only free association, talk, and dream analysis, but also psychodrama, cathartic techniques, free drawing, and also more positive techniques like the “ideal model.” That is, imagining and acting as if one has already solved the problem.
Stuart Miller: Naturally, one must reckon with Freud: repression of problems is not solving them. On the other hand, and this is my second point, one doesn’t have to wallow endlessly in childhood remembrances, ten years on the couch, in search of cleaning out all the garbage purportedly in one’s past. That’s too frequently the approach of psychoanalysis, and I think, personally, it’s an illusion and wasteful of time. Assagioli, of course, wouldn’t use such harsh words; he’s very sunny and good-tempered. But I think that one of the advantages of psychosynthesis is that it uses psychoanalysis but doesn’t get lost in it. For me, as a director of Esalen, one of the most exciting things about Assagioli’s theories is that they provide room for all of our approaches to human growth: encounter, psychoanalysis, meditation, sensory awareness, gestalt therapy, the myriad body disciplines, transactional analysis, rational-emotive therapy, and so forth. Each and all of these can be useful to particular people at particular points in their own personal development. Thus, a man may need at various times to analyze various blocks, or learn to feel his emotional energy in encounter, or learn to use his imagination by means of inner imagery techniques.
Stuart Miller: What about this concept of “The Higher Self in the second diagram?
Roberto Assagioli: I’m glad you asked that at the end, because it allows me to say that there is an enormous amount of fundamental material we haven’t covered in this brief interview.
Stuart Miller: People who are interested can read at greater length in Assagioli’s books. The Higher Self or the Transpersonal Self is one of the subtler concepts, but I’ll put it this way. I think each of us knows that in him, related somehow to his purest identity, is an energy, perhaps one could say a being, a force, that represents the highest in him. In the old religious language, people used to call this the spirit or essence or soul . To some extent it is a mystery. But one of the most exciting things about Assagioli’s works is that he has brought this mystery into the center of modern psychological thought, and without ever leaving behind all the more mundane realities with which each of us has to cope. ■
