As we approach the Millennium, there are many pointers to the need for a visionary psychology. Several psychoanalytic authors have very recently published books rediscovering the spiritual dimension. To those with a psychosynthesis background, this is hardly news. Assagioli began the process seventy odd years ago. How is it then that psychosynthesis has remained the Cinderella of modern psychology when her sister innovations such as Gestalt, Transactional Analysis and Rogerian therapy have all become widely accepted? This short article attempts to give an answer to this question.

Assagioli was undoubtedly a visionary. Despite his work on the Will, his vision of psychosynthesis remained abstract, and it has been left to those who came after him to translate and ground this vision. He himself likened psychosynthesis to a child which needed our care. An important characteristic of children is their potential, and it is this sense of unrecognized potential that is still emphasized in psychosynthesis literature today. We make an implicit promise, a promise of what we may be that is attractive especially to those with spiritual aspirations. It links up with our yearning and longing for that state of union that we hope will resolve our alienation.

Unfortunately, many spiritual traditions are caught in a dualism that separates and alienates matter and spirit, body and soul, reason and instinct. The spiritual path can encourage its adherents to rise above their lower nature. This dualism gets reflected in psychospiritual theories such as the concepts of the lower and higher unconscious in psychosynthesis, and there follows from this an inevitable depreciation of the lower in comparison with the higher. James Hillman is very strong on this and critiques a spiritual superiority which takes us away from life to abstract realms of mountaintops.

This emphasis on spiritual yearnings has its shadow. It is a bright light that in the past has all too often inflated young egos as they ascended on beams of light from the tops of mountains. The ascension, the call to a higher purpose, to the higher self, all amount to an invitation to reach upwards where the air is brighter and more spiritual. The danger as well as inflation is the making special in a narcissistic manner that defends against depression and limitation with spiritual grandiosity. In an early copy of the Synthesis journal, Jim Vargiu shows how you can take a client from recognition to synthesis within the space of one session. Another well known trainer informed me with pride that she could take her client anywhere.

These examples could easily be dismissed if they were not characteristic of the hidden or denied shadow in psychosynthesis generally. The shadow is constellated by its polarity. As soon as I desire to be good, I constellate its opposite in my unconscious. The emphasis on the higher constellates the lower and, because this is unconscious, this lower gets either projected out onto others, who are not so special, or gets acted out in the sorts of tyrannical grandiosity that is evident in the history of the psychosynthesis community.

What is important here is not that we have a shadow-of course we do. Every organization, system or movement has one-why should we think we are so special? Having a shadow is nothing to be ashamed of. The shame is in the denial. When in 1980 I began to talk about the shadow of psychosynthesis, I had one senior member of the community come to tell me that there wasn't one, or at least not in Europe! Delighted as I am to now see shadow work widespread in psychosynthesis, I sometimes wonder about the workshop promises to "own the shadow." Is it something that can be owned? Who would own it? The very ego which was creating it, of course, except that...the ego cannot assimilate its own unconscious. This seems to be like another turn of the same inflated circle, in which we think we can assimilate everything.

The idea of untrammeled growth has taken a timely beating from ecological research which shows the vital importance to the Earth's balance that we live within our means. Yet the importance of acknowledging limitations and of accepting the value of frustration are not widely embraced principles within Transpersonal Psychology circles and psychosynthesis in particular. As Assagioli himself said in an interview with Sam Keen, "The limits of psychosynthesis are that it has no limits. It is too extensive, too comprehensive. Its weakness is that it accepts too much."

This difficulty with boundaries and the desire to fly high are characteristics of what Jungians have called the Puer archetype. My image for classical psychosynthesis is this same Puer, the eternal youth who like Pegasus, the winged horse, has the gift of creative imagination and loves to fly off to lofty heights far away from the painful world of human limitations. Similarly, the Icarus myth describes the Puer's tendency to inflate and carry us to intoxicating heights where we lose sight of these limitations. Icarus' mistake is to ignore the rules of his father, Daedelus, who told him not to fly too high (or too low). Although a master of creative invention himself, Daedelus is perceived by Icarus as a Senex figure who imposes unnecessarily safe restrictions.

The interesting thing about fly boys and girls is that they do not seem to cast a shadow. The shadow is adrift somewhere out of sight. Similarly in the psychosynthesis community, the Senex has fallen into an invisible shadow by the continued Puer emphasis on the intoxicating heights of imagination. It is only recently that a shift of emphasis has made it possible for the giving of attention to working in committees such as that of the AAP and the EFP (European Federation of Psychosynthesis). Such a boring rule-governed activity would have been unthinkable for the psychosynthesis of earlier years, even if it had been politically possible. The narcissistic attitudes mentioned above would have made it impossible to pay attention to such ordinary activity when the greater work on the higher order problems called.

I want to own up to having many Puer characteristics myself-I hate committees. But over the past ten years, I have been dragged into the mud of committees on psychotherapy accreditation, dealing with tax men over disputes that our accountant failed to solve, and many other down-to-earth activities the likes of which I would never have imagined myself doing. This process has had a definitely transforming effect. At first I feared I was losing my creative spark and it is probably true that my flame is less bright these days, but I also feel myself more ordinary and more accepting of the need for detailed work. While I have always sought soul in the big questions and visions, I am now also recognizing it in the very ordinary and small details of my life. There is so much more to be written about this subject, and the willingness to commit myself to words that are frozen in time is a typical Puer problem, which may help us understand the dearth of psychosynthesis material.

What I have tried to do here is to bring attention to the Puer pathology from which many in the psychosynthesis community suffer and the importance of engaging shadow work as part of the process of Assagioli's child growing down into the world. Reframing such work on the shadow not as the pathology that we should have overcome in our therapy, but as the mature approach to realizing our authentic nature will make a significant contribution to this growing down. One of the areas critically in need of attention in the craft of psychosynthesis therapy is that of therapists' buying into the idealized transference they receive. In overlooking these idealized projections, they continue to inhibit their clients' ability to grieve the loss of what they have not received in their childhood, and model and collude in the ongoing denial of the shadow.

In terms of my original question, I do not think it is wrong that psychosynthesis has taken this long to grow down-it has important learning to assimilate on the way. Late developers are not necessarily stupid, but they may have an ambivalence to entering into where their fate calls them. If we are Cinderellas, then perhaps we need to give more attention to grieving the loss of the mother than to making it with the prince!

Chris Robertson is a registered psychotherapist in the UK and has been a psychosynthesis trainer since 1978. As well as psychosynthesis, he has studied child psychotherapy and family therapy. He is a co-founder and director of Re·Vision and acts as a consultant to other training organizations. He has a private practice with individuals, couples and families in London.

To find out more about Re·Vision visit its web site. This site invites you to re-visioning your thinking about the Millennium using psychotherapeutic skills to read the signs of the times. As well as offering psychotherapy training, articles and courses from an Integrative Psychosynthesis perspective, it includes research on dreams and other collective events.