ABSTRACT
In the egg-shaped diagram, Assagioli describes several kinds of unconsciousness the lower, middle and higher unconscious, and the collective unconscious. Assagioli's other reservation concerns the self-absorption that can come out of constant self-analysis, and also what he refers to as psychic inflation'. It is instructive to reflect on these dangers as Assagioli lists them, because his comments give something of the unique flavour of psychosynthesis. It is ironic that Freud, working in the scientific, rational, medical tradition, concerned with illness and with pathology, should have been the means of bringing the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the subjective/irrational, together into one framework which eventually became accepted in Western thinking. As in psychosynthesis itself, many disciplines have contributed to the creation of an area of knowledge and activity in an immensely productive way. In psychosynthesis it is very common to find subpersonalities founded directly on fairy-stories or on myth.
