Roberto Assagioli

Roberto Assagioli (February 27, 1888-August 23, 1974) was an influential Italian psychiatrist, born in Venice. He was the founder of the transpersonal psychology movement known as Psychosynthesis.

Biography
Assagioli was a student of Sigmund Freud and introduced Freud's teachings to the medical fraternity in Venice in 1910. He is one of three Italians credited with being pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement.

At the same time, around 1910, Assagioli laid the groundwork for Psychosynthesis. He saw that there was a need for something beyond analysis. This was the need for a person to become whole - to be united in synthesis.

Assagioli maintained that just as there was a lower unconscious, there was also a superconscious. He describes this as a realm of the psyche which contains our deepest potential, the source of the unfolding pattern of our unique human path of development. Assagioli formulated his discoveries into an approach he called psychosynthesis. This term of course distinguishes it from psychoanalysis, but Assagioli did not mean thereby to replace psychoanalysis, but rather to complement and include it.

Psychosynthesis then is not simply a model of pathology and treatment, but a developmental approach which can help guide a person to understand the meaning of their human life within the broad context of synthesis - the drive towards the harmonisation of all relationships, whether intrapersonal, or interpersonal, between individuals and groups.

"Only the development of his inner powers can offset the dangers inherent in man's losing control of the tremendous natural forces at his disposal and becoming the victim of his own achievements." - Roberto Assagioli, The Act of Will, 2002, p. 6

Selected works

 * Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings by Roberto Assagioli ISBN 0967857007
 * The Act of Will by Roberto Assagioli ISBN 0670103098