The men in my meditation group are all experienced psychotherapists, and they agree on a trend they see: clients come in for specific, short-term reasons, and then leave. The old days of open-ended psychotherapy, of having a therapist as a weekly guide in life, seem to be waning, replaced by goal-oriented client requests. This is of course taking place against a backdrop of medication replacing psychotherapy for the more serious emotional struggles, a trend that has been observable for many years now. Our group agrees that they don’t know any psychiatrists who conduct depth psychotherapy: at least in our area, psychiatry has become twenty minute consultations to renew prescriptions for medication.
Where does this leave psychosynthesis? Unlike European countries such as England and Italy, psychosynthesis has never achieved any official status in the United States. There are no graduate degrees granted in psychosynthesis as in England and no state-approved postgraduate training as in Italy. In the United States, psychosynthesis remains both unrecognized and – perhaps problematically – free to reflect the individuality of the professional teaching it.
In this context, we at the New York Psychosynthesis Institute have been focusing for several years on training professionals in transpersonal development. There is a great need for even a bare education in the transpersonal aspect of human nature within the American psychological community. Despite its many specialties and divisions, the American Psychological Association (APA) has repeatedly turned down transpersonal psychology as a division.
Conscious of Assagioli’s posthumous collection of essays, Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis, we named our recent book Transpersonal Development: Cultivating the Human Resources of Peace, Wisdom, Purpose and Oneness to provide a training manual for any professional drawn to transpersonal/psychospiritual work. Included in the book are short vignettes of clients’ transpersonal experiences, and we remain astounded that well-meaning non-psychosynthesis colleagues don’t believe that the clients really had such experiences. Having worked with clients in drastic situations for many years, including advanced cancer, deep addiction, and HIV-AIDS, we’ve frequently used psychosyntheis-based transpersonal techniques to help them go beyond their fear and suffering: as a result, transpersonal breakthroughs are common in our work. This does not make us special: rather, it simply points to the objective reality and ready access to the transpersonal in each person’s nature.
The lack of clinical transpersonal experience in our non-psychosynthesis colleagues points to a vast area of opportunity for psychosynthesis education and contribution to our field. I have no idea if this is true in other cultures and would love to hear other views on this issue of the repression of the transpersonal in psychology and psychotherapy.
Bio: Richard Schaub, PhD, is co-founder and co-director of the New York Psychosynthesis Institute and the Huntington Meditation and Imagery Center (www.huntingtonmeditation.com). He is the co-author of five books on psychosynthesis-related topics (www.florencepress.com).