ABSTRACT
Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal, or spiritual, psychotherapy, a phenomenon of the twentieth century Western world. It is a theory and practice of individual development and growth, though with a potential for wider application into social and indeed world-wide settings; and it assumes that each human being is a soul as a personality. Dr Assagioli was a psychiatrist who involved in the development of psychoanalytic theory at the very beginning of his career, but who worked out his framework for psychosynthesis simultaneously and independently. The sources that he lists in Psychosynthesis are those which he regarded as scientific. Like Freud, and indeed most psychiatrists today, he determined that his work should pass muster and be accepted as a respectable scientific theory. Assagioli explicitly kept these mystical interests separate from psychosynthesis, but clearly his wide knowledge of many centuries of spiritual thought is relevant to the theory and practice eventually developed in psychosynthesis though this is rarely acknowledged in his therapeutic writing.
