Table of content
This is the most comprehensive biography currently available online, outlining some of the most important features of his work, personality, and private life.
Compiled and translated by Hanne Lund Birkholm and Kenneth Sørensen
Roberto Assagioli was very reluctant to give interviews about his life, as he believed it was wrong to focus on him as a person, rather than the development of psychosynthesis. However, under pressure from his colleagues, he agreed towards the end of his life to have a biography written, and chose the Boston psychotherapist Eugine Smith to write it. Assagioli died shortly afterwards in 1974, and the biography was never written. So what we know about Assagioli’s personal life and in general, we have from his own publications and from people who worked with him or otherwise knew him.
Main features of Assagioli’s upbringing and youth
Roberto Marco Grego was born in Venice, Italy, on February 27, 1888, where he spent his childhood. His father died when Roberto was 2 years old, and his mother Elana Kaula (1863-1925) remarried in 1891 to Doctor Alessandro Emanuele Assagioli, from whom Roberto got his surname.
Assagioli grew up in a wealthy Jewish home with an interest in art, music and literature, and where he received private tuition, as was typical of the environment of the time. His need for beauty, art and music was thus stimulated early on and is also clearly seen to be part of the basis of psychosynthesis.
The fact that his great interest in Eastern philosophies and thus man’s higher spiritual potentials was also aroused early on is perhaps due to his mother studying Theosophy. Theosophy is a philosophy that was formulated in the late 19th century and developed into a movement that began in North America and then spread to Europe. The philosophy is even older, having roots back to early mystical traditions from both East and West.
Italian, English and French were spoken at home. He was a curious and inquisitive child and later learned to speak Greek, Latin, German, Russian and Sanskrit before he was 18. He loved to write and express himself, and at the age of fifteen he published the article Unconscious Desires and Conscious Work in the journal Giornale di Venezia .
He was influenced early on to take an interest in international affairs and traveled extensively, also alone. At the age of 17, he traveled to Russia and experienced the Russian Revolution. This experience helped to shape his ideals of freedom created by non-violence and non-dogmatic social systems. Through his many travels, he saw that people are the same regardless of which country they come from and that deep within all people there is a longing to develop their highest potential.
His parents moved in 1904 to Florence, where he lived most of his life, so that Assagioli could study at the medical faculty, Istitutio di Studi Superiori , from which he received his medical degree, specializing in neurology and psychiatry.
After World War I, he lived and worked for some years in Rome, where he married Nella in 1922. They had a son that same year, who was christened Ilario Assagioli. Their marriage was close and loving, lasting 40 years until his wife’s death in 1963.
Assagioli’s education and first articles
In 1907 he began his dissertation, which he completed at the age of 21 under the title: Psychoanalysis – an introduction to Freud’s scientific discoveries, in which he also presented a vision of a holistic approach to psychology with a focus on human growth and man’s experiences with the spiritual dimensions. The goal of the holistic approach was to live a more complete and rich life and, as he himself says: “To live as well as one can and look at oneself with a smile.”
Almost simultaneously, he completed a critical article on psychoanalysis, which he perceived as limited and unfinished. But he was deeply committed to the exploration and development of Freud’s discoveries about childhood and the unconscious. In an interview with Sam Keen from Psychology Today, December 1974, he answered the question about the main differences between psychosynthesis and psychoanalysis: ” We place much greater emphasis on the higher unconscious and on the development of the transpersonal Self. In one of his letters, Freud wrote, ‘I am only interested in the basement of man.’ Psychosynthesis is interested in the whole building. We are trying to build an elevator that can give the person access to all levels of the personality. Frankly, a building with only a basement is very limited. We want to open up to the roof terrace, where you can sunbathe and look at the stars .” Read: Roberto Assagioli’s Golden Mean
His criticism was mainly that psychoanalysis was too focused on the pathological in man rather than studying and strengthening the healthy, as a path to healing and recovery. Furthermore, Assagioli believed that human consciousness contained more layers of consciousness than Freud operated with. He worked to create a psychology that contained the drives as well as love, will, creativity, wisdom and spirituality. In other words, a psychology with a focus on the whole person.
During the same period that he was writing his doctoral thesis, he had his psychiatric internship at the San Salvi psychiatric hospital.
In 1909 he published his new ideas in the journal, La Psicologia delle idee-forze e la Psicagogia . The academic environment at this time was very reluctant to accept Assagioli’s hypotheses.
Already at the beginning of the 20th century he published several articles that bordered on both medicine, pedagogy, philosophy, culture and religion, and which later came to form the basis of psychosynthesis. In 1906 he published his first comprehensive article on psychosynthesis in Farrari’s journal, inspired by Freud’s article: Jokes and their relation to the unconscious , with the title: Gli effetti del riso e le loro applicazioni pedgoiche . It dealt with the meaning of laughter and its relationship to education. The article is today known as, Smiling Wisdom.
Assagioli had a broad interest in philosophy and culture and was part of several groups of young liberal freethinkers in Florence at the time. He was one of the most active editorial members of the cultural journal Leonardo in Florence until 1907. The journal, which was a meeting place for young intellectuals in Florence, was founded in 1903 by one of his close friends, the self-taught writer and intellectual Giovanni Papini. Pictured right: The editorial staff of Leonardo, Assagioli, Papini and Vailati
Assagioli had an early, obvious sense that man is not a superior animal or a machine. This was in contrast to the prevailing view that medicine and psychology could be viewed on an equal footing with other technical fields.
In 1911, he began to formulate the concepts of psychosynthesis and went on to dedicate his entire professional life to this work.
Psychiatric career and development of psychosynthesis
After graduating in 1910, Assagioli studied and trained in psychiatry in Switzerland with Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. Bleuler was the pioneer who defined schizophrenia and was one of the first doctors to accept psychoanalysis. At the same time, Assagioli opened a practice as the first psychoanalyst in Italy. He was reportedly not satisfied with either his work or the results of his clinical work. In parallel with his studies with Bleuler, he further developed his psychology in Italy, which he initially called bio-psychosynthesis and later psychosynthesis. He was not the first to use the word, psychosynthesis, it was also used by Bezzola.
In his early clinical practice, Assagioli used psychoanalytic techniques, but his vision of the human being prompted him to elaborate a larger coherent conceptual framework that could include love, wisdom, creativity, and will. His position was not that psychoanalysis was wrong, but rather that it was incomplete.
While working in Zurich, he immersed himself in psychological studies, with a particular interest in the work of William James and Henri Bergson. Here he met Carl Gustav Jung and became good friends with him. According to Assagioli, it was Jung’s psychology that was closest to psychosynthesis. Read: CG Jung and Psychosynthesis
Assagioli was the only Italian member of the Freud Society in Zurich, which was composed of pioneers in psychoanalysis. He was also a member of the International Psychoanalytic Society . He was deeply committed to the exploration of psychoanalysis and the unconscious and, together with Freud and Jung, contributed to the preface to the official Yearbook of Psychoanalysis and Psychopathological Research , in which he also wrote an article entitled: “Freud’s Theories in Italy”. He contributed articles and commentaries to Freud’s other journal, Psychoanalysis . He started a study group with 19 members to delve into the understanding of the human psyche.
In a published letter from Jung to Freud, it appears that there was a hope that Assagioli would bring psychoanalysis to Italy:
“… Our first Italian, Dr. Assagioli from the psychiatric clinic in Florence, is a very pleasant and perhaps valuable acquaintance. Prof. Tanzi (Professor at the University of Florence, ed.) assigned him our work for a thesis. The young man is very intelligent and seems extremely knowledgeable and is an enthusiastic follower who enters the new territory with the right vitality. He wants to visit them next spring.” Source: Roberto Assagioli 1888-1988, published by the Italian Institute of Psychosynthesis.
However, Assagioli never met Freud in person, but wrote with him.
In the history of psychoanalysis, his name appears as one of the first Italian pioneers. That alone made him remarkable at a time when all forms of study of the human interior were perceived with skepticism. In addition, as we have seen, he worked in parallel to develop psychosynthesis. He communicated his ideas and thoughts, among other things, through his journal, Psyke (Psyche) in the period 1912-1915, when it had to close due to the war. His articles were later published in another journal called Ultra and are said to have had an explosive effect on the culture of the time. In Psiche he published and translated the first of Freud’s writings into Italian, approved and authorized by Freud.
During World War I, he did military service as a doctor and psychiatrist.
Psychosynthesis is developed
In 1926, Assagioli founded the first institute, the Istituto di Cultura e Terapia Psichica , in Rome, which later became the Istituto de Psicosintesi . The invitation to the inauguration states that his inaugural speech will be about how the will can be developed. One of his two most important books was later titled, The Psychology of the Will. But it was not published until shortly before his death in 1974. In 1927, the school published a book called, A New Method of Treatment – Psychosynthesis . And in 1933 he was granted permission to call his school in Florence, the Istituto de Psicosintesi . The institute was headed by Countess Spalletti Raspoini, who was also president of The National Council of Italian Women .
In 1928 he gave a series of lectures at the institute – The energies latent in us and their use in education and in medicine – which came to form the theoretical basis for the work with inner opposites. In short, psychosynthesis is based on the hypothesis that every feeling or reaction has an opposite pole, which is worked on to unite and create a synthesis between them. The one who brings about the synthesis is the active acting ego – the observer – the controlling factor in man and later the higher Self.[1]
Assagioli agreed with Freud that healing childhood traumas and developing a healthy ego were necessary goals. But his entire work was largely about showing that human development does not stop there, and that the healthy person has a potential for development, which Maslow later called self-actualization. Assagioli went further and wanted to show that human potential also includes the possibility of experiencing spiritual and transpersonal dimensions.
Psychosynthesis thereby becomes the earliest precursor to the humanistic and transpersonal psychology of the 1960s, which constitute the 3rd and 4th waves in the history of Western psychology.
On this basis, he becomes co-editor of both the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology .
It was important to Assagioli that psychosynthesis be seen as an open psychological system in continuous development, rather than a religious teaching or philosophical doctrine. In his first book Psychosynthesis , he writes: “Psychosynthesis does not aim at or even attempt to provide a metaphysical or theological explanation of the great mystery – it leads to the door, but stops there.”
It was therefore also important to him that the various schools and institutes that sprang up around the United States and Europe were independent and not centrally controlled. He was not in the least interested in leading any kind of movement or organization and refused to have administrative control over the development of psychosynthesis.
Assagioli’s basic view includes both the individual and society, with a focus on synthesis and wholeness rather than analysis and division into smaller units. Assagioli attempts to create a psychology in which there is a synthesis between Eastern mysticism and philosophy and Western psychoanalysis and logical thinking. It was important to Assagioli that psychosynthesis remained scientific.
Assagioli’s inspirations
Assagioli, like CG Jung, was influenced by Eastern and Western mysticism and esotericism. As mentioned, his mother and even his wife were both Theosophists. And the origin of Theosophy from the Hindu/Neoplatonic tradition in particular is also central to his thinking. The kinship with the Eastern and Western mystery traditions is clear in relation to his perception of the Self, which is very similar to the Eastern description of Atman. For Assagioli, the Self is a core of consciousness and will, which is not the body, emotions and thoughts. Self-realization is for Assagioli also an evolution of consciousness, where higher and higher expansions of consciousness lead to union with the Universal Self. These thoughts are also characteristic of the Eastern yoga traditions. The Neoplatonic is reflected in his notion of emanation. In his book: Transpersonal Development he writes:
“We have now reached the fifteenth group of symbols, illustrating the resurrection and return referred to in the Gospels as “the prodigal son returns to his Father’s house”. This is a return to an earlier stage and marks a return to the original and primary being. It presupposes a theory of the emanation of the soul, the soul descending and becoming one with matter and then returning to its “home” in Heaven – not as it was before, but now enriched with experiences of self-knowledge developed and matured through struggles and conflicts.”
However, Assagioli also makes numerous references to Western mystics, including John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi. Within Western psychology, there is no doubt that William James, CG Jung and Viktor Frankl were close spiritual companions. In his understanding of the pathological conditions of the lower unconscious, he drew on many of the psychodynamic theories throughout his life. He believed that prior to spiritual development, psychoanalysis – not in the classical sense – had to be carried out, but a deep psychological transformation.
But when it comes to determining his true spiritual affiliation, theosophy is the strongest. He was a close friend of the esotericist Alice Bailey and joined her Arcane School in the early thirties. Among other things, Assagioli wrote the preface to the Italian edition of Alice Bailey’s commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
It was not something he wanted too much attention for, as he wanted to be seen as a scientist first and foremost. When psychologist Jim Fadiman visited Assagioli in 1972, he noticed that a portrait of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, hung in his waiting room. When asked why it was necessary to remain silent about his esoteric affiliations, Assagioli stated: “It is my religion and until I die I want silence about it”.[2]
He made no secret of the fact that his faith also included reincarnation. In an interview with Sam Keen he says the following:
“Death is for me first and foremost like a holiday. There are many hypotheses about death, and the idea of reincarnation seems to me to be the most reasonable. I have no direct knowledge of reincarnation, but with my belief I come into good company with hundreds of millions of people in the East, with Buddha and many others in the West.”
But Assagioli clearly distinguished between his own religion and his work as a transpersonal psychologist and psychiatrist. He was not an intellectual in the strict sense of the word, he was much more of a mystic and his theories about man were based largely on his own inner experiences.
Important developments
In the 1930s he published several articles that were later included in his first book: Psychosynthesis from 1965. Among them are perhaps the two most important articles on psychosynthesis to date: Dynamic Psychology and Psychosynthesis and Self-Realization and Psychological Disorders . In the article, Dynamic Psychology and Psychosynthesis , from 1933, he first presented his oval diagram, or as it is also called, the “egg diagram”, as a picture of the human psyche, where the relationship between the conscious, the unconscious and the collective unconscious is outlined, and the stages of psychosynthesis. The second article is about crises in connection with spiritual development and is published in the book: Transpersonal Development .
In 1938, the Istituto de Psicosintesi in Florence was closed by Mussolini’s fascist government, which was critical of Assagioli’s Jewish background, his humanism and international outlook, and he was arrested, imprisoned and placed in solitary confinement for a month that same year.
This would also prove to be important for the further development of psychosynthesis. He is said to have told his friends that his time in prison was an interesting and valuable experience, which gave him the opportunity to practice special psycho-spiritual exercises. Initially he felt powerless, but he made an important realization about the will. He discovered how he could really choose how he would relate tothe imprisonment.
He turned his imprisonment into a favorable opportunity to explore the inner realms of consciousness by meditating for several hours daily and writing articles about his experiences. He later said that he had never felt such peace and enjoyed being alive in such a way before. At the time of his death, he was working on an article dealing with this experience entitled: “Freedom in Prison ”.
The years of World War II were hard on family life, as Assagioli lived underground and often had to sleep in the open. In 1943 he was again actively pursued and had to hide in remote mountain areas. Here he found himself with an English paratrooper and several escaped prisoners. He had two dangerous escape episodes from the Nazi-Fascists who were after him personally. They looted and destroyed his family’s country estate near Florence. [3]
Life during World War II probably contributed to weakening both his own and his son Ilario’s health, so that his son died of a severe lung disease at the age of 28.
When the war ended in 1945, Assagioli was able to resume his work of spreading and developing psychosynthesis. And The Institute of Psychosynthesis was re-established in Florence, where it continues to operate to this day. In 1951, he founded The Italian Union for progressive Judaism under the World Judaism Union for Progressive Judaism . It was based on a concept of openness and of understanding and cooperation with other people and religions with the aim of creating an organic and creative synthesis of all humanity.
Psychosynthesis began to spread to the United States and Europe in the years after the end of the war. In 1957, The Psychosynthesis Research Foundation was founded in Delaware, USA. It was later moved to New York and this foundation published several of Assagioli’s articles in English. In 1958, in connection with Roberto Assagioli’s visit, a school was established in Valmy, USA, with psychosynthesis training and psychosynthesis research. Psychosynthesis schools were subsequently also established in many places in the United States, Switzerland, Austria and Great Britain. During these years, Assagioli had a good collaboration with A. Maslow, whose article The Creative Attitude was published by the above foundation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, psychosynthesis expanded in North America and Europe. Many different schools emerged, several of which have since closed. Today, it is possible to take an MA in psychosynthesis from the two institutes in London.
In Scandinavia, there are Psychosynthesis institutes in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Today, Psychosynthesis is also approved by the European Association for Psychotherapies EAP and has its own umbrella organization under EAP, which is called the European Federation for Psychosynthesis Psychotherapist.
During his career, Assagioli wrote several hundred articles and essays, many of which have been translated into several languages. A large selection of these can be found at www.psykosyntese.dk. The best-known of his books are Psychosynthesis , which was published in 1965, and Viljens Psykologi from 1974. He worked on a book up until his death, which was subsequently published under the name: Transpersonal Development . In addition, a smaller book has been published: Psykosyntesens Typologi , in which the outline of his psychosynthesis typology is formulated. All four books have now been translated into Danish and are sold by Kentaur forlag: www.psykosyntese.dk
In 1994-1995 the International Psychosynthesis Directory was published and at that time there were 107 psychosynthesis institutes in 32 countries. Some have probably closed and others have been established since then.
Piero Ferrucci on Assagioli
Let us conclude this biographical description of Assagioli’s life and work with a statement by Piero Ferrucci, one of Assagioli’s students and himself a prominent teacher and writer. He is probably the person who knew Assagioli best due to his many years of collaboration with him. He is the author of, among others, Become Who You Are and Inevitable Grace .
In his foreword to A Psychology With a Soul by Jean Hardy, Piero Ferrucci writes:
“To my knowledge, Roberto Assagioli is the only individual who personally participated actively in the unfolding of two distinct and fundamental revolutions in 20th-century psychology. The first revolution was the birth of psychoanalysis and depth psychology at the beginning of the century. Assagioli was at the time a young medical student, presenting his doctoral thesis on psychoanalysis, writing in the annual Jahrbuch, side by side with Freud and Jung, and was part of the Zurich Freud Society, which constituted the group of early psychoanalytic pioneers.
The idea of the unconscious processes of the mind made a lasting impression on him, an impression that he later developed into a series of hypotheses that went far beyond the framework of orthodox psychoanalysis.
The second revolution in which Assagioli participated was the creation of humanistic and transpersonal psychology in the 1960s. A.H. Maslow was the pioneer of these new developments. The main idea was simple: instead of focusing on diseases as a way of defining the human being (as psychoanalysis has too often done), or on the structural similarities between the nervous systems of humans and animals (as behaviorism proposed), the humanistic and transpersonal view was to emphasize mainly the organism’s striving towards wholeness, on the human potential for growth, expansion of consciousness, health, love and joy, without denying the discoveries of the other schools. The richness of contrasts and exchanges was particularly important for Assagioli’s background: consider such diverse acquaintances (some of them short-lived, others lasting) as the Italian idealist Benedetto Groce, the Russian esotericist PD Ouspensky, the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Sufi mystic Inhayat Khan, the Zen scholar DT Suzuki, the Tibet explorer Alexandra David Neel, plus the psychologist Viktor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, Robert Desoille, the creator of guided daydreaming, and CG Jung before and after his break with psychoanalysis. Such contrasts, combined with a life full of experiments and reflections, undoubtedly created broad perspectives for Assagioli’s own creation, what he called psychosynthesis.
Sources:
1. Assagioli, Roberto, Life As a Game And Stage Performance . Psychosynthesis Training Center, 1983.
2. Ferrucci et. Al, Roberto Assagioli 1888-1988, Instituto di Psiconsintesi, 1988
3. Firman, John, Dimensions of Growth,
4. Firman, John, A psychology of the Spirit , Suny, 2002
5. Hardy, Jean, A Psychology With a Soul , Woodgrange Press, 1996
6. Keen, Sam, Assagioli’s Golden Middle Road , Psychology Today, December 1974, http://www.psykosyntese.dk/a-103/
7. Löfwendahl, Peter, Discovering Psychosynthesis , Huma Nova Förlag, 2003.
8. Russell, Douglas, Psychosynthesis and Western Psychology ,
9. Schuller, Michael, Psychosynthesis in North America , booklet 1988 published by the author
10. Unknown, In Memoriam: Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974), Synthesis Journal II, 1975
[1] Read the article: Balancing and Synthesis of Opposites ,
[2] Psychosynthesis in North America , Michael Schuller, 1988, p. 53.
[3] According to Dane Rudhyar in Astrology and the Modern Psyche.
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