ABSTRACT
This chapter describes psychosynthesis which has taken on board many of the insights and the techniques. Fritz Perls's work in Gestalt became of considerable importance to psychosynthesis therapy and is now used extensively within the training. The technique of guided imagery, springing from work by Desoille, Happich, Leuner and others, was a natural tool for transpersonal psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has been greatly influenced this century by existentialism and phenomenology. Irvin Yalom in his Existential Psychotherapy, published in 1980, traces the setting up of humanistic psychology as a discipline in 1950, whose intention was to address itself to those human capacities and potentialities that have little or no systematic place, either in positivistic or behaviourist theory or in classical psychoanalytic theory. A parallel development and one very significant for psycho-synthesis as it has developed, is Gestalt theory, which links existential philosophy with a holistic and dynamic understanding of the person.
