Following the passing of Diana Whitmore on August 25th 2026, her close friend Piero Ferrucci shares his memories of her, giving a treasured insight into the early days of their lives as psychosynthesis students under Roberto Assagioli and of the beginnings of the modern Psychosynthesis Trust.
This post was originally shared by Piero via Facebook on Sepember 5th 2026.
Before becoming Lady Diana Whitmore, Diana was a hippie.
The first time I met her was in Menlo Park, California. The Psychosynthesis Institute had a “Basic Training” going, and I was invited as a guest. During the first round of introductions, Diana, whose name was Becchetti, said in a triumphant voice: “I am Italian, like Roberto! (Assagioli).” She spoke in the tone of a cheerleader—which she had been at university—and that happy, enthusiastic quality never left her. She was still in her hippie period, when she was experimenting with everything. Her mentor had been Dick Price, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, where she lived for some time. She was fond of gardening, and would see elves in nature. She was experimenting with everything— even did Rolfing while on LSD, which should give you an idea of her explorative bent.
I met her again later when she visited Assagioli at his summer residence. Between the two of them there was instant recognition. Those were the fun days. I happened to participate in a conversation with her, Assagioli, and, I recall, one or two other students. I cannot remember the exact subject, but it was a deep discussion about the soul, the universe, our destiny, and death, and it was slowed down by the fact that, because Assagioli was almost deaf, we had to write down our questions and comments. At the end we were all spaced out. And Assagioli, 85 years old at the time, was very tired. He wanted to end the session, so he suddenly stood up and said, “enough for the evening,” then made an astonishing remark: “Have a good orgy!” We all sat there nonplussed, not being quite sure we had understood what we had heard, and then burst out laughing. Diana and I sometimes used that remark with our students at the end of a working day, when everybody was tired, eager wanting to go home, and we wanted them to think about anything but psychosynthesis: “Have fun! Become unconscious! Have a good orgy!”
Diana got along famously with Roberto. She did one of the things she was best at: making him feel supported and understood, and helping him efficiently. In the summer of 1974 I was to travel to the US, so I suggested to Assagioli that Diana substitute for me in assisting him, and at the same time study with him. That’s just what happened, and little did I know that these were to be the last months of Assagioli’s life. Some time later she, as well as my good friend Andrea Bocconi, who was there too, called me in Los Angeles: “Roberto has a bad flu. He is not himself anymore. It looks like his soul has already left. You should come.” I caught the first plane, and during the night I had a vivid dream: a beautiful, big falling star was trailing through the starry sky and dissolving. There was a feeling of awe. I could sense that something was coming to an end.
I did not get back in time to say a last goodbye, but that was when the friendship and collaboration with Diana started. From the beginning I felt a strong bond with her, a sense that we had a task to accomplish together. So through the years we gave innumerable workshops together, teaching psychosynthesis. This was immensely useful, for both of us. Every time you teach, you also learn: you have to learn to express concepts and use techniques, and that is the best way to clarify an idea for yourself and then assimilate it, and deal with students’ questions and reactions. Assagioli had left his students a beautiful vision; however, we all had to anchor it in practical content and useful techniques for contemporary life. And that’s what we students did through the years. We taught and taught and taught, and we learned and learned and learned.
Diana and I went to Holland and to Switzerland many times. I remember once in Holland, the first time Diana went there, and at the end of a talk the students were bombarding her with questions and comments; she was giving perfect responses. But after that session Diana was very upset. She thought they were angry and rejecting her. Instead, they were enthusiastic! Their intensity meant that they were completely fascinated by what she had just talked about. Cultural difference!
Well, that was one of the rare times she misread people. She was supremely deft at listening and understanding; I could actually see her intuition at work. And I believe she was one of the best therapists I have ever met (I am thinking of Assagioli, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Laura Huxley, my aunt). When she intervened in a workshop, I could see people being visibly transformed and filled with gratitude.
From Diana I learned a lot of things. She was able to see the soul of people. And working with her I participated in that: I could suddenly see what she saw in people—their inner beauty, their dignity, their soul. For instance, after a meditation we had led, she pointed out to me a woman who was silently reflecting on what she had realized during the meditation. Diana said to me: “How beautiful she is!” The woman was evidently filled with inner wonder and quiet joy. And she had been a cranky participant up to that point. I would not have noticed. Which made me think: the soul is right there in front of our eyes: but do we see it?
I also remember a workshop in those early days of our collaboration that was a complete failure. It was about an eminently difficult subject: “Humor Is a Serious Thing” was the title. But we did not realize that humor is an arduous subject to tackle. We just thought it was fun. Almost as soon as the workshop started, we realized we were in trouble. Everybody was so serious! We debated, and people came up with abstruse definitions of humor; there was not one smile: boredom reigned. People did not run away, but it was no success. A few months later I understood why: It was while I was putting Assagioli’s notes in order and came across one note in which he had written to himself something like, “Speak seldom and always briefly about humor.” That’s because humor is a paradoxical quality. You cannot own it: it comes when it comes, and quickly vanishes. It is like grace. It is grace.
Some time later Diana decided to move to London together with her partner John. Because there had been serious trouble in the Californian branch of psychosynthesis, she was now on her own. She started from scratch: she gave workshops in a rented room. The man who rented her the venue was the strangest eccentric you could think of. He thought the end of the world was near, so he collected canned food just in case, then threw it away every six months, when it reached its expiration date.
Soon her work expanded. She took over the Psychosynthesis Trust, established years before by Assagioli, but dormant. Her activities flourished through years of hard work. That was another one of Diana’s qualities: dependability, hard work, bringing a project to completion. The work ethic. In that she was indefatigable, maybe too much so, as she often worked herself to exhaustion. But in that way, with the collaboration of several brilliant colleagues, we created the three-year training, and after that, the two-year training for becoming a therapist, with the help of our friend Massimo Rosselli.
She knew very well that she was working too much, and at times she made an effort to take care of her health. Sometimes in very appropriate ways, like getting and keeping fit; at other times in ways that made me a little dubious. I remember her saying proudly, “There are no carbohydrates in this house!” Or, at another period, she would make breakfast smoothies out of raw broccoli, linseeds, and blueberries. “Would you like some?” “No thank you, I am not hungry right now.”
There was yet another quality that she transmitted to me: the capacity to be informal and easy-going, to loosen up. At the beginning of my work I was rather stiff and formal; I would enunciate ideas as if I were a high-school teacher; and I was shy. Instead, she was spontaneous, warm, casual; occasionally she would make fun of me right in front of the group. Little by little I understood that, in my own way, I could relax and be like that too.
Sometimes, however, Diana was too relaxed, in the sense that, in her innocent faith in all human beings, she trusted everybody and saw their inner beauty, but that opened the door to being taken advantage of. This was part of a general process in the psychosynthesis world. We began, when we were young, by thinking that if you laid the emphasis on goodness and love, everything would be OK. But we forgot the shadow. Little by little the psychosynthesis movement discovered that we were not only good and holy, and that all would not always be well; in the world around us and, yes, in ourselves as well, lurked the shadow—that part of us which is capable of selfishness, ugliness, and disloyalty, and incompatible with what we believe ourselves to be. So our teaching began to give more attention to that theme. We knew that positive thinking could become positive stinking.
But we could still fall into a trap. I remember one day when Diana enthusiastically announced to me on the phone that a major British TV channel had done an in-depth piece on the Psychosynthesis Trust, with hours and hours of filming and interviews, which would soon be used for a documentary on emerging ideas in the UK and the world. This was something big! Finally we were getting the publicity we deserved! But when I watched the film, which had just been shown on national TV in prime time, my heart sank. The documentary turned out to be about the weirdest cults: people speaking in tongues or adoring fetishes or performing sinister rites. Towards the end of the show came psychosynthesis. The documentarist had deftly used the material he had and, by astutely cutting this or that piece, had succeeded in presenting psychosynthesis as a kooky sect doing eerie rituals and supporting dubious theories. At the end, the documentarist portrayed himself joyously and dreamily running and skipping in a field of flowers, making a mockery of it all. A disaster, but luckily it was soon forgotten, and we survived.
One day Diana asked me to drive her and her father to his native city, Todi in Umbria. He was American, but had been born in Italy and wanted to reconnect with his roots. I gladly obliged. So we went to the beautiful town of Todi, and soon he began to remember places and find his way around. He wanted to find something out, so he entered a bar. I thought I was going to translate, but lo and behold! He quickly moved ahead and started talking to some people in Italian.
This is when I started worrying. Here was a man coming back to a small Italian town some 60 years after having left it, dressed in a Madras jacket, speaking a funny Italian, looking 100% American, and walking into a bar where he knew nobody. He had come all the way from America just to find his roots, and I was afraid he would meet with indifference, if not hostility.
At first it looked as though that was exactly what would happen. I saw that Diana was also perplexed. The people in the bar had the jaded attitude that locals sometimes have towards a tourist. At first, the look in their eyes was like, “What on earth do you want?” But it soon changed to puzzlement, then to interest, until I saw warm smiles of recognition on their faces, which soon turned into delight and excitement.
It was a most amazing scene. Within minutes people were arriving, and distant relatives were meeting for the first time after so many years, telling each other stories and mentioning common acquaintances. The reception was wonderful! Diana’s dad was the hero of the day, and very happy. And so was she, perhaps connecting for the first time with her Italian roots.
In 1980 we held an International Psychosynthesis Conference in the stunning Medici villa of Artimino. My friend and colleague Massimo Rosselli and I organized it for the Istituto di Psicosintesi. It was the first big international psychosynthesis meeting after Assagioli’s death in 1974.
This was a delicate moment, because there had been all kinds of trouble in the psychosynthesis world (Assagioli himself had told me, half-jokingly, “after me, the deluge”). So, for the first time, people from many countries converged to reaffirm old relationships, establish new ones, and find new inspiration.
Diana helped a great deal, introducing, coordinating, cheerleading, and giving a talk. But I remember especially her funny line at the end: “Roberto Assagioli said that psychosynthesis is spiritual coffee. We have had our spiritual coffee, so now let’s move out onto the lawn to have our real and well-deserved coffee!”
And so we did, surrounded by the Tuscan landscape at its best, at the magical hour of sunset. A memorable moment.
Diana’s husband, John Whitmore, was a great conversationalist, always telling stories, and in many ways an exceptional man. He had been a Formula One driver and a movie producer (he made one film, Here Comes Everybody, on Esalen Institute and encounter groups). He was one of the creators of coaching, and his book on the subject was published in dozens of languages (I monitored the Italian edition). He was also deeply interested in esotericism, the paranormal, and UFOs. He could not stand American politics, and at one point, as a protest, he sent a massive quantity of metal junk to be delivered to the American Embassy in London. The Embassy did not react very well, but still could not reprimand him too severely because he was a Lord. They discovered that he had done the mischief, but he was in no way embarrassed. He was always very kind and hospitable to me.
Their house was the outer expression of Diana’s love of beauty and order; you found lovely shells and stones everywhere. The meals she prepared were like her notes and archives, somehow an expression of cosmic order (I am sorry to say that her orderliness never rubbed off on me).
In their home you could see a genealogical tree about two meters high. John’s family dated back to the 11th century, I believe, and the first male child of each generation would dress in a special costume, the same one that had been handed down through the centuries, and they would make a painting—or, in Jason’s case, a photo—of him wearing that costume. Because John was a Lord, Diana became a Lady when they married, and, at least at first, she took that seriously. I remember one night when we were in Holland for a training, she came up to my room and knocked excitedly on my door to wake me up with the news: “I have been invited to meet the Queen!” She was very pleased and excited. Sadly, the marriage with John came to an end after many years, and they had to leave their dream house in the country. It was an immense pain for her.
Jason is Diana’s beloved only child. She asked me to be his godfather, and I discovered that it was a very rewarding occupation. At that time I was still a bachelor, and I would come to London and stay a couple of days after a training workshop. I played with Jason; we built castles, performed magic tricks, went to the park, jumped on the trampoline, read books, and we laughed and immersed ourselves in the joy and fun and mystery that a child can bring. Being a godfather can be a fun job. For instance, one day Diana, Jason, and I went for a walk in the park. Diana had told him that babies are often bald, just as he was when he was born. I was carrying him piggyback, and he would touch my bald head from time to time. I could feel that he was silently reflecting. After a while he asked, “Are you a baby?”
I also invented “the little man”: two of my fingers would become a little man who would walk and talk and jump and get upset and so on. He and I would make up all kinds of stories. But as he grew up, his mind changed; he understood more. And one day he went to his mother in the middle of the night, woke her up, and said, “you know what? The little man is just fingers.” The end of innocence.
Diana was a fantastic mother, but she would have liked to be a full-time mother. Sometimes she said, “I should have just left work and been a mother 24/7, forgotten about career.” But since her hippie days she had also become a very competent businesswoman. Look at the Trust home: a four-story building in central London. When we arrived there, we could see the Tower of London on the other side of the Thames: the area was still almost untouched. Then it became gentrified, and buildings started growing all around us, among them the Mayor’s funny, leaning, oval building. The Trust proved a great investment. Still, the hippie soul in her never died; in fact, it was alive and well all along.
Then there was Sascha. Sascha Dönges lived in Basel, and so for a long period we would teach psychosynthesis on the banks of the Rhine. Sascha was extremely intelligent, with a fantastic sense of humour, and she loved classical music and good food. She was also a fine photographer: she took the photograph of Jason and me with her Leica. She had a touch of cynicism, too. She had a big heart (as cynics often do), and she liked to surround herself with hearts—painted ones, or hearts made of crystal or other materials, including chocolate. That’s no small thing: for her, heart – Love in all its aspects and levels was the most important value. She always treated us very well when we went to Basel. She gave Jason and my children wonderful fluffy animal toys.
She also wrote a book on psychosynthesis, Psychosynthese für die Praxis, and translated my Crescere into German, then even found me a publisher—all without accepting any payment. Now that is a true friend. She became Jason’s godmother. A wonderful friendship blossomed among the three of us. Unfortunately, at a certain point Sascha made some serious mistakes in her work, and her relationship with Diana deteriorated. What a pity! She once told me that everyone in her family died at the age of seventy-two. And at seventy-two, she too died.
As my wife Vivien was reading this piece, she reminded me that I had left out two important themes: one is community (maybe because I am an individualist). Diana believed in group support. Since the beginning of humanity people had lived in groups and communities, and only in very recent times we had divided into nuclear families, each living on its own. So she put her philosophy into practice, changed her life, and moved to Findhorn in Scotland, where she had friends and a community founded on shared principles: closeness to Nature, inner listening, and service.
The other theme was “one step at a time”. I told you that Diana liked to experiment with all kinds of challenges. So when the opportunity came to go on an arduous 17-day Himalayan trek, she took it. And arduous it was—an extreme effort. Many times during the trek she thought she did not have the strength to finish it. But she was in it, and couldn’t turn back. And wouldn’t turn back.
So she applied to the trek the same philosophy she had applied to her other efforts: one step at a time. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And then another step. And so on. Just focus on the step you are taking now.
This was also Assagioli’s philosophy. I once told him that I had too many things to do and was feeling stressed. He told me: the stress is in your mind. Just focus on the task at hand, and do that well. If you do what needs to be done and concentrate only on that, without thinking at the same time of the thousand other things you have to do, the demands of other people, the sheer mass of little and big things waiting for you, you don’t get stressed. You get stressed when you try to hold all of them in your mind at once. If you do this, not only will you be not be stressed, but you will also be at peace with your conscience.
Hoc age, as the ancient Romans said: do just this. Otherwise, it’s as if, while eating, you were to visualize everything you are going to eat over the next six months: you would be overwhelmed. And this is how Diana went from an impromptu group in a rented room to a successful school in the heart of London, recognized by the university and with international teachers. One step at a time.
Diana also met my aunt Laura Huxley in Hollywood. It was a decisive meeting for both. During the summer, at times we would all stay at her house. By then I had married and had two children who became very fond of Jason. Laura had a deep, caring interest in children, their rights and potential, their need for love and warmth. But she also worried about the tragedy of abuse and neglect. Her organization, Children Our Ultimate Investment, had teenage students look after toddlers for about three hours once or twice a week. It was a big lesson for the teens, and the toddlers enjoyed them hugely. The idea was to help teens see what it is like to be with a small child before they decide to have a child themselves, and perhaps to lower the rate of unwanted teenage pregnancy, which was rampant at the time.
So she inspired Diana, and Diana decided to continue her work in London. She called the initiative “Teens and Toddlers.” In working with at-risk adolescents, she did what for her was probably her most cherished work. She felt that therapy was now in the past for her, while helping at-risk adolescents to flourish was her vocation. Later, when she moved to Scotland, she reinvented her work and called it “Growing2gether”. She never abandoned the Trust, however, and kept training students there.
It was always a pleasure to co-lead with her. We came to the point where planning a whole workshop would take ten minutes, and it felt like we were in tune all the time. It was awesome to see how she touched the students: there was learning, transformation, soul-making, happening right in front of our eyes. It was an honour to work with her. After Assagioli, she was my best psychosynthesis teacher.