The following extracts are from Dr Angie Fee’s chapter in the second volume of Petra Guggisberg Nocelli’s Know, Love, Transform Yourself. ‘Through, With and In’ explores sexuality and gender within a psychosynthesis framework, with a particular focus on the significance of identification as a route to non-duality.
‘To know something fully is always to hold that part of it which still mysterious and unknowable’ (Rhor, CAC, 2021 Feb)
Psychosynthesis and nonduality
Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal perennial philosophy, a belief that there is reality beyond the variations of cultural and relative truths and conceptual ideas. According to Assagioli (1973,89), the founder of psychosynthesis, ‘the essential unity of human nature existing beneath, and in spite of all individual and group diversities’.
Within the contemporary fields of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, there is a recognition of a deeper Self at the source of the process. A soul presence as the organising principle of this lifetime and force seeking expression (Yeoman, 2020). Psychosynthesis as a model of unity is a nondual approach which is a recurrent theme in the world religions and philosophies, stating that there is a Divine Reality inherent in the world of all things. (Rhor, 2018).
Nonduality means not two, (comes from Advaita (Sanskrit), earliest use of the word in Upanishads, then in western language other than English from 1775) and is the recognition that underlying multiplicity and diversity of experience, there is a single infinite and indivisible reality.
A hallmark of this awareness is that there is no separation between God and humans, not between humans and other humans (Bourgeault 2008) Non duality means there is no distinction between mind and matter, underlying is an indivisible Being/God/Self, a shared oneness. In Psychosynthesis, we are all a manifestation of this reality.
In other words, Psychosynthesis is the energetic expression of life force and our personality work is how we embody our life force. Psychosynthesis views the core of our being as a dynamic energy, a life force (Freuds’ libido, eastern chi,) which at birth begins the process of differentiation from universal to personal. Our personal sense of identity is generated through what Bourgeault (2008, 35) describes as our binary operating system which is a grammar of perception built into the human brain. It perceives through differentiation and its’ through this lens that we divide the world up in order to perceive it.
It’s at the level of the personal that we begin to identify with our culturally conditioned personality and form boundaries, developing a separate self which is concerned with such issues as self protection, forming identities, belonging to groups and traditions. From this we form a narrative of our lives that then provide us with meaning and purpose. These stories reflect a culture or society’s belief systems which help to hold groups together. Those belief systems become an identity which gives us a sense of self.
As human beings, boundaries are necessary at a basic level of the self, and it is through our individual self that we have our different perspectives and experiences. Hence our Self/Source is experiencing itself through different bodies, through our individual constructed culture filters. And as human beings we become psychologically attached to them and identified with them. In other words, as autonomous independent and individual human being, promising potency and the ability to create our own lives. (Whitmore, 2015).
And it is through these different incarnations and identifications, as human beings, we forget our universality / our basic unity with the deepest Source/ Self. Psychosynthesis provides the idea of disidentification as a way of working with those belief systems and personality identifications, a way to create some space through, with and in the identification and reconnect to a more spacious present moment. In Psychosynthesis terms, I-Self connection. It is through these multiple and contradictory identities that the Self manifests.
Our belief systems are a significant aspect of those identifications which create these boundaries and derive from the dualistic thinking that underpins our culture and packages and labels our life force thru our sexual and gender identity. I am not arguing against belief systems, we need them to give us structure and meaning in our lives. I’m drawing attention to what happens when we totally identify with them, leaving no room for doubt.
Psychosynthesis presents a model of unity and an aspect of this is a nondual approach used to describe the holding of opposites, being with ambiguity. But the reality of that is challenging to our dualistic minds which can only understand in terms of binaries, between here and here, as if there’s a process. The dualistic thinking that is entrenched in western thinking is inadequate in attempting to discuss the idea of a unitive model, mainly because the moment I speak about it, I am separate from it. Perhaps this demonstrates being human and divine at the same time.
It is worth saying at this point, that it could be argued that taking up a nondual approach could easily be setting a duality in itself, and I have certainly experienced it as a tricky landscape to navigate. Whilst acknowledging that psychosynthesis itself can be seen as yet another a belief system, just another set of social and mental constructs by which we think we have found the ‘truth’, when teaching, I have found it useful to describe it as an attitude, a conscious position or viewpoint that we take. This can help to keep our thinking fluid and not fixed, becoming another identification.
Generally, we have our sexual and gender stories. Society offers people a master narrative, a lens through which we look to give our sexual and gender experience meaning. Those stories also perform conservative and preservative tasks, bringing some order to the general ambiguity and disorder of our world, which can bring relief and a sense of coherence to our lives. Yet while those well-established stories can create a sense of identity and belonging, they can also create a process of organising which includes tighter classification and strong boundaries, closing down other possibilities. It contributes to a universal ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
The last century has seen the normalisation of this narrative and has permeated all areas of social life, becoming a source of social and psychological regulation and control. In this way, our sexual and gender identity and experiences have become oversimplified and generalised into fitting master narratives, which don’t allow for other stories to be told. These stories assume a normality, which inevitably excludes those who fall outside this idea. In my teaching and clinical work my interest has been in providing a space where people could begin to touch the edges of their hidden stories, which inevitably mirrored my own hidden stories.
My Phd research of transgender identities using a narrative approach highlighted how peoples sexual and gender stories exposed some of this oversimplification, emphasising the wider historical and cultural conditions that shape and form how people understand their biological body, gender identity and erotic relationships, I drew attention especially to one of those conditions; namely the influence of dualistic thinking in how people form and shape their sexual and gender identities. At the same time, my clinical work and teaching work I noticed how a dualistic way of thinking set parameters and policed the boundaries of what is possible, particularly in the experiencing of our desire and in the construction of sexual and gender identities.
My experience of the psychotherapy world is one where sexuality is organised around the homosexual/heterosexual binary, with heterosexuality maintaining its privileged status. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender is still thought of as a “minority”. This process of “othering” continues to create individuals and groups that are deemed less important, based on historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender and sexuality (Yep 2003). As such, heterosexuality is produced and reproduced and normalised as a standard against which people are measured. In this way, dualistic thinking has remained unquestioned. And as stated above, there are currently ongoing divergent understandings as to the ontology of sex and gender that are subverting these long established normalised identities and practices.
Dualistic Thinking and Disidentification: Through, With and In
The Psychosynthesis model as a model of unity is a useful and creative framework for highlighting and educating people on the insidiousness of dualistic thinking which has been and is very powerful in how we experience our identities. This is part of our overall emphasis of exploring how our belief systems shape and influence how we experience our sex and gender identities which always take place within a larger cultural context. This includes deepening awareness of how the heteronormative discourse creates and maintains binary thinking and classifications. In this way, we can examine how we regulate ourselves within our own particular cultural contexts and how we prevent different stories being told and engage with different kinds of questions that can disrupt and unravel our dualistic way of thinking.
My approach to this was exploring belief systems as the core of the teaching weekends, beginning to be aware of what they were, naming them, and gradually deepening awareness of how those belief systems influenced and shaped experiences of the students’ sexuality and gender. An aspect of belief systems is that they usually allow one experience and forbid another, so any new information or possibilities is not allowed to emerge from our unconscious. Imagery and visualisations offers new ways to move beyond those conscious constructed belief systems, requiring of course a willingness to be surprised at what may emerge.
Assagioli’s (1973) phrase ‘we are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified’ becomes quite a challenge when it comes to people identifying with and specifically disidentifying with their sexual and gender identity. This kind of exploration would often lead to challenging discussions, voicing strong opinions regarding what are we born with and what do we construct. But this is the much argued familiar nurture and nature debate and I was not so concerned with engaging in the essentialist/constructionist debate on whether sex and gender are innate or sociological categories. If we can hold the possibility that its both, we can begin to explore the significance of cultural and collective processes on how we understand and experience our identities.
This includes moving to a position of identifying and reflecting on the belief systems that have led us to our identifications and how those beliefs have shaped and brought meaning to our experiences. This is tricky when we get our sense of self from our belief systems. Surely, in all our psychological explorations, the one thing we could be sure of is that we are a man or a woman?
Assagioli (1973) developed the disidentification exercise as a meditation technique leading to having the inner power to choose whether to identify with or disidentify from different aspects of our personality. One of the changes I made to this was to include ‘I have my sexual identity and I am more than this’ and ‘I have my gender identity and I am more than this’. Again this was a challenging statement to experiment with, especially if we see our social and gender identities as core identities.
Though the disidentification exercise can certainly be a useful tool in developing more awareness and promoting the experience of ‘I’, I notice how easily the idea of identification can be easily skipped over in the Psychosynthesis model, often in a bid to get to the disidentification prematurely. This can encourage a more egoic disassociated stance as a step away from uncomfortable aspects of ourselves. I refer here again to the process of working with identifications – the focus on allowing ourselves to experience without packaging the experience too quickly, exposing the contradictions and subversions produced by our experiences. Of just letting a moment grow (Eigen 1998), allowing ourselves to be intimate with the moment. Equally important is acknowledging that experiences aren’t fixed truths, something to be captured and packaged up. Far from it – opening ourselves to experiencing provides an opportunity to challenge dominant psychological and social belief systems that we have invested in and often become our identities. In other words, too be aligned with the present moment – Tolle (2001) describes this as the power of now – is when the unmanifested flows into this world and if we can accept that moment a bit of space opens up.
I don’t intend to idealise the present moment as an experience of infinite transcendence. In my own experience of opening up to experiencing the pain of loss in the present moment, I heard myself say ‘this is unbearable ‘and in that moment of saying it, I’m bearing it. And something in me shifts and is never the same again. The person that couldn’t bear the unbearable dies. (Ram Dass, 2019) In this way, the route to nonduality is through our identification, and we can avoid the danger of disidentification becoming a separate activity from identification. The idea isn’t to move from identification to disidentification, as if we’re trying to move away from the idea of experiencing life, and easily creating yet another duality.
I see it as a way to create space through, with, and in the identification, reconnecting to a more spacious present moment. To be here now. The idea of identification /disidentification can be useful in allowing us to hold the psychosynthesis model as one way of viewing the world, being mindful of turning it into another belief system that holds ‘the truth’. In this way the model can be inclusive of different belief systems within it.
For instance, this chapter is describing my relationship with psychosynthesis, which hopefully helps me steer clear of making Psychosynthesis a thing, or a truth. Through my own immersion and identification with and in psychosynthesis model, I have developed my own meditation practice of identification/ disidentification which has enabled me to have a relationship with it, allowing my own critiques. It is the unconscious identification with our beliefs and personality contents that creates splits which in turn creates external splits. It is worth reminding ourselves that Psychosynthesis is one kind of story/ framework that gives people direction and meaning. I would like to think that this framework is not limited to any one particular culture or belief system and can be seen as a symbol for something more transcendent, something bigger than ourselves, whichever filter we view this through. And to do this we need to stay awake and conscious to our continuous identifications and our tendency to protect our well developed identifications. For myself, the identification work has enabled me to hold a more spacious knowing in my work, whilst aiming for allowing a multitude of viewpoints and an everchanging inclusivity.
Whilst holding the notion of ‘we are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified’, can we also be mindful of not getting attached to that very statement, to be mindful of not turning this into another belief system. Psychosynthesis can certainly help to cultivate non attachment to various beliefs and perspectives, to access life beyond the conceptual mind. But not at the cost of distancing from diversity and retreating into an all inclusiveness where we avoid differences and the messiness of life. In fact I would argue, it is in the process of identification that we can connect with our nonduality, the art of staying with the here and now, being present to our embodied experience.
Intersectionality
One of the alternative ways we can begin to make room for and explore sexual and gender identities outside a dual model of heteronormativity and to hold the diversity and multiplicity of identities is to look through the lens of intersectionality.
In my research and clinical work, I find that an intersectional approach helps to expand and deepen my understanding of the complexities of identity. An intersectional approach is rooted in the feminist movement of the 1980s, and grew out of feminists of colour arguing that most feminist scholarship was from middle class /white/educated women. The phrase was coined by American civil rights advocate Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) who recognised that there were important differences among women and men rather than simply between them. Feminist scholars argued that gender, race and class are interconnected as ‘intersecting oppressions’.
Many of us have particular hybrid identities that are created at those intersections of identities,
In this way, intersectionality challenges one-size-fits-all stereotypes, adding to complexity, rather than reducing it. An intersectional perspective recognises that many of us fall between the cracks of heterosexual, black, class and spiritual discourses – we don’t just fit into one of those identities but they all interact with each other bringing multiple dimensions to our experiences. For instance, a black middle class gay man will have a different experience of his sexuality/gender to a white working class gay man. This challenges the presumed homogenous idea that all gay men are same, ignoring how some categories carry more privilege compared to others.
But I don’t want to draw a picture of intersectionality being about simply setting up conversations between all our different identities and integrating them neatly. This is complex, messy, contradictory territory.
Subpersonalities and disidentification are two key aspects of the Psychosynthesis model that are very effective in the deepening exploration of our identities and belief systems. Working with the active imagination tools and techniques offers much in terms of exploring things not yet imagined. The concept of subpersonality describes a synthesis of belief systems, behaviour patterns, traits, thoughts, feelings that have formed round an inner need that has to be expressed. Subpersonality work has the potential to expand on the multidimensional nature of identity and to recognise and include the multidimensional interconnecting systems of power and oppression that are to be found cultural, generational histories and narratives that are invested with various powers, privileges and oppression. The process of psychosynthesis is at the heart of this work. By this, Assagioli meant a movement towards organisation and coherence within the human personality, among individuals and among human groups. (Firman &Gila 2010).
As Psychosynthesis therapists we are made all too aware of the importance and significance of psychological identity – self-esteem, self-awareness, self-reflection – all connected to our sense of I. But what about our social identities, those identities that we claim membership of and the personal meaning that we give those categories? Can we really explore and understand our sexual and gender identity without considering how social structure and social identity influence the way we view and experience our desire and gender?
This is not about learning new skills in how to work with particular groups of people or studying other people, but rather being committed to explore and understand how our own intersecting identities have developed within our own particular cultural context – sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, age, socioeconomic status, generational level, level of education, religion, spirituality – How do these different social identities interact with each other and what is the conflicting nature of power some of these identities hold? This process includes a deepening awareness of how systemic and institutionalised models such as racism and heteronormativity, have created privileged and oppressive social divisions. This can be a challenging and threatening process, particularly if we have normalised and internalised our own positions of power and privilege.
It means recognising that two different individuals who identify as heterosexual may experience their heterosexual identity very differently depending on the following intersecting categories of gender, age, class, religion, immigration status, race, level of education, able-bodiedness. A young Scottish-Asian man whose grandparents emigrated 30 years ago and a young Scottish-Asian man whose parents emigrated 50 years ago may have different experiences of their sexuality and gender. Though they may share the same ethnic background, they may have vast differences in their experiences of gender, acculturation, language and family roles.
To ignore these intersecting social identities can result in the individual feeling profoundly silenced. A singular identity doesn’t acknowledge the significance of connecting to a history, tradition and culture. It ignores the complex multidimensional categories and it colludes with the ‘normalisation’ and ‘essentialising’ of those social categories, which for the main, remain unquestioned.
Revisiting Bifocal Vision
[So] can we view therapy as a space to explore not only psychological identities but also our social identities and the complex interactions between both? Indeed, seeing through an intersectional lens allows us to recognise that how we construct our psychological identities is vastly influenced by the social categories that we belong to. In this way, we can consider the ways in which ‘intersections of class, geographical location, dislocation, sexual and gender identity, racialization, ethnicity, indigeneity, disability, citizenship and the environment are enmeshed in processes of social justice and injustice’ (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). In other words, understanding identity as a political location, a perspective that considers and emphasises the contextual systems and structures within which our identities came about. A bifocal vision.
It is worth a reminder that just because Psychosynthesis is a model of unity, it doesn’t mean that the aim is to create a generic experience and understanding of life. It does not mean taking flight into non dual thinking, transcending the messiness of desire and difference. This dual world is necessary for all our experiences and insights, its where we are all living, it’s all we’ve got. The dual world is the ordinary world (Almaas) and we practice who we are in the dual world. We see what the conceptual structure of our culture allows us to see and since duality is part of our cultural heritage, it is important that we see the limitations of this model and the unexamined philosophical assumptions.
In Psychosynthesis, the emphasis on lived experiential work encourages a platform for exploring and experimenting with creating our own desire[s], opening up new possibilities, allowing and tolerating experiences that’s seen weird and strange. Eventually pointing to new pathways/discourses and identities. It is through these hidden stories, these new counter narratives that subvert dualistic thinking that the Self manifests.
I would like to end by quoting Bourgeault’s (2008, 31-32) comment on the Christian teaching – ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. She translates this as seeing your neighbour as a continuation of your being. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other; there are simply two cells of the great Life.
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