Roberto Assagioli
Roberto Assagioli (27 February 1888 – 23 August 1974) was an Italian psychiatrist and pioneer in the fields of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Assagioli founded the psychological movement known as psychosynthesis, which is still being developed today by therapists and psychologists who practice the psychological methods and techniques he developed. His work, including two books and many monographs published as pamphlets, emphasized the possibility of progressive integration (that is, synthesis) of the personality.
Roberto Assagioli
February 27, 1888
August 23, 1974 (aged 86)
Italian
Psychiatrist
Life[edit]
Assagioli was born on 27 February 1888 in Venice, Italy, from a middle-class, Jewish background. He was born Roberto Marco Grego, the son of Elena Kaula and Leone Greco. However, his biological father died when Assagioli was two years old, and his mother remarried to Alessandro Emanuele Assagioli soon afterward. Assagioli was exposed to many creative outlets at a young age, such as art and music, which were believed to have inspired his work in Psychosynthesis. By the age of 18, he had learned eight different languages, including Italian (his native tongue), English, French, Russian, Greek, Latin, German, and Sanskrit. It was at this age that he began to travel, mainly to Russia, where he learned about social systems and politics.[1]
In 1922 he married a young woman named Nella Ciapetti, and they had one son, Ilario Assagioli.
In 1940, Assagioli was arrested and imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist government, having been accused of "praying for peace and inviting others to join him along with other international crimes."[2] He was placed in a solitary cell in Regina Coeli prison for 27 nights, until he was released and returned to his family. During World War II, his family's farm in Florence, Italy was destroyed, and both he and his family went into hiding in the Catenaia Alps (in the province of Arezzo) and in the Upper Tiber Valley. His son died at the age of 28 from lung disease, which was accredited to severe stress from the harsh living conditions during the war. After the war ended, Assagioli returned to his work and began his legacy, known as Psychosynthesis.[1]
The years after the war were relatively calm, and it was during this time that he founded various foundations dedicated to Psychosynthesis in Europe and North America. Assagioli lived a long and prosperous life with a happy forty-year marriage until he died at age 86 on 23 August 1974. The cause of his death was unknown.[1]
Assagioli did not like to discuss his personal life, as he preferred to be remembered for his scientific work. Very few biographical accounts about the life of Assagioli are available, and most are not in English.[1]
Education[edit]
Assagioli received his first degree in neurology and psychiatry at Istituto di Studii Superiori Pratici e di Perfezionamento, in Florence in 1910. During this time, he began writing articles criticizing psychoanalysis, arguing that he had a more holistic approach.
After finishing his studies in Italy, Assagioli went to Switzerland, where he was trained in psychiatry at the psychiatric hospital Burghölzli in Zürich. This led to him opening the first psychoanalytic practice in Italy, known as Istituto di Psicosintesi. However, his work in psychoanalysis left him unsatisfied with the field of psychiatry; as a whole, he felt that psychoanalysis was incomplete.[1]
Spiritual work[edit]
Assagioli was also interested and active in the field of consciousness and transpersonal work. Having studied theosophy and Eastern philosophy,[5] his written work developed different meditation techniques, including reflective, receptive and creative meditation. He also contributed to several spiritual groups in the tradition known as the "ageless wisdom."[6] He founded two groups intended to teach meditation based on the ideas of the New Age teacher Alice Bailey: The Group for Creative Meditation and the Meditation Group for the New Age.[7][8] He was also a co-founder of the School for Esoteric Studies, intended to teach the work of Alice Bailey at an advanced level.