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The Will and Concepts of Change

'Roberto Assagioli was an Italian psychiatrist 1888-1974 who believed that psychology should not just concern itself with investigating the depths of consciousness but with the higher unconscious. He believed that discovering our true self and following our purpose would lead to spiritual health and fulfilment. Psycho synthesis' is a psychology of the will. Most of psychology has been extremely wary about the notion of will. The reason for this is that the concept makes no sense within the determinist paradigm within which both operate. One notable exception to this has been Roberto Assagoli. Assagioli was originally a psychoanalyst and later founded 'Psycho synthesis' - a therapeutic approach aimed at developing the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual potential of a person into a harmonious whole.

The aim of this paper, therefore, is to show an understanding of the processes and dynamics involved in bringing about (facilitating) change in my development as a 'Psycho synthesis' applied student and in the context of my past work in business and in my personal struggle to overcome alcoholism and in working through my training project on the 'Psycho synthesis' course.

The Psycho-Spiritual Context

Psycho-synthesis presents us with a model of the human self at the heart of which is the I, the part that experiences thoughts feelings and emotions. In psycho-synthesis the self is seen as the core of who we are, the centre of our being. The self is much more than our experiences or beliefs and feelings. Our real self is something completely different and as such can act as a unifying centre which takes every conscious and unconscious aspect of ourselves and brings them together. Assagioli (1965) says of the self that it is:

…above or beyond the personality and unaffected by the flow of the mind-stream or by bodily conditions; and the personal, conscious self should be considered merely as its reflection, its projection in the field of personality (Assagioli, 1965:19).

Thus, the central aim of psycho-synthesis is to make us more aware of this centre and how we can direct this part of ourselves to achieve what we want from life rather than being driven by our feelings and emotions. When we do get to know our true self then Assagioli says that we reach a point of pure self awareness (Assagioli, 1965:18).Getting in touch with this central part of who we are is necessary to achieve human potential. We are, as are all human beings, affected by the collective unconscious. What Assagioli calls our middle unconscious represents the present, or our immediate field of awareness. This field of awareness changes constantly as different aspects of our lives come together. The past is named as our lower unconscious. This part of ourselves contains all those things over which we have no conscious control, such as repressed memories and traumatic past events. Our higher consciousness or transpersonal self is our future. It is the spiritual part of our being, sometimes called the higher self, and represents what we can become, our greatest human potential.

The Will

A central component of Assagioli’s thought is that of the will. Assagioli said of the will that it is the central element and direct expression of the I, or self (Assagioli, 1973:245). In psycho-synthesis the will is much more than the common view of using will power, it is concerned with how we express who we are. Assagioli (1973) held that although people use the will when making choices in every day life it is not always coherent. We can sabotage our future because of our own bad habits which interfere with our choices. Without coherent choices we cannot effect lasting change. First we have to recognise that the will exists, that we personally have a will, and that we can exercise that will. People make coherent choices when the will is trained to operate with the true sense of who a person is. Assagioli (1973) speaks of the strong, the good, and the skilful will, the development of which leads to the transpersonal will. There needs to be a balance between the strong, the good, and the skilful will. The strong will might be compared to Victorian ideas of will power where an outcome for change was forced through the will. The skilful will allows us to
..stimulate, regulate and direct all other facets of our being, our emotions, thoughts, impulses, intuition, imagination and sensations in order to achieve our desired goal (Assagioli, 1973:13).

The skilful will helps us to choose those actions that are most in accord with our purpose. The strong will and the skilful will are personality aspects of the will, whereas the good will is a value which is expressed in the way we operate the skilful will. It is often concerned with how we are with others. Because we are aware of these uses of the will Assagioli maintains that they must exist within our consciouness. Consciousness is prior to individual awareness of the will. This notion is found in the work of philosophers such as Kant for example where consciousness was apriori or pre-existent. This is why people often speak of consciousness in collective terms. Later research by Goddard (1997 has resulted in his argument of pre-birth consciousness. He argues that there are emerging higher level fields of information that mediate between the individual and the collective. Thus he extends Gros’s basic peri-natal matrices and demonstrates that consciousness and the transpersonal are both space and time free.

The transpersonal will is an expression of the transpersonal self, so it only operates when we have achieved a coherent will (Assagioli, 1973). There are also six stages and three levels to the operation of the will. The levels are, the personal, transpersonal, and the universal will. The will enables us to express our highest self through change and action because the spiritual energies of our trans-personal self are embodied in the will. The relationship between will and change is dynamic. Operation of the will can produce lasting change which then results in further use of the will it is this which Assagioli calls psychosynthesis, the relationship between who we are and what we do. In ancient traditions such as the Hindu tradition training the will is a central feature. The will is trained beyond the focus of much personal psychology and leads to an experiencing of the higher or transpersonal self (Grosso, 2005). Assagioli said of the will that it was a core component of the true self and that its development and training was necessary because of its function in:

..deciding what is to be done, in applying all the necessary means for its realisation and in persisting in the task (Assagioli, 1973:6).

In psycho-synthesis the will is a prime factor in change because it regulates the choices that we make. Assagioli (1973) believed that

the job of the skillful will is not to force but regulate the drives, urges, images, ideas and other psychological functions of one’s personality. He urges gymnastics of the will, beginning with physical gymnastics, a way of strengthening the will (Assagioli, 1973 cited in Grosso, 2005:29).

Before a person is fully aware that they have a will they may live in a state of denial and of not being true to who we are. Without this awareness we drift through life, a victim of its circumstances, it is here that we may develop addictions such as alcoholism where we are truly without the will to overcome it. Once a person is aware that they have a will then this presents possibilities for making changes and for taking responsibility for our lives. Assagioli developed a framework for using the will to implement change. In order to will something then a person would first connect with their emerging sense of purpose or what most inspires them. Emerging purpose might be seen as opportunities that soul is seeking to come into relationship with self and Self As an applied student my purpose is emerging through my self development as a practitioner. This I believe will facilitate my capacity to manifest purpose and meaning in the world, and to connect with the will to service. People usually discover an emerging purpose through other changes in their lives. Sometimes this is simply a shift in focus as to what might interest them or it could be a change of career. This is particularly the case if that change is one that serves others, moving for example from a profitable business to counselling and helping others to deal with loss and to find their own true purpose. The person would then look at their values and how that might inform what they wanted to do. There would then follow a statement of intention, what a person intended to do. A process of choosing between alternatives would follow, together with other supporting choices. In this way a goal is stated along with a course of action for the person to follow.

When one is invoking the will to overcome alcoholism there are a number of processes that you go through in order to complete what Assagioli (1973) terms an ascent to the development of the good and transpersonal will. The first aspect of this is the struggle that a person faces within themselves as they become aware of what is going on, then they cross the threshold by admitting that they have a problem. This he terms the struggle of the will and the struggle of the will emerges because of the ways in which we identify ourselves with what is going on around us. Thus, for an alcoholic the self-identification with drink and the chaotic lifestyle that this induces are so prominent in awareness that they paralise the will and prevent action. My personal struggle with alcoholism lasted for fifteen years and my self-identification with the problem kept me locked in a cycle of negative behaviour. While I continued with this identification I was unable to hold down a job and was continually moving from place to place to avoid being found out. While I remained within this cycle I was also unable to work effectively with people. Eventually I realised that I had to disidentify myself with drink, Assagioli says of this struggle with the will that:

We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we dis-identify ourselves. . . Every time we "identify" ourselves with a weakness, a fault, a fear or any personal emotion or drive, we limit and paralyze ourselves. Every time we admit "I am discouraged" or "I am irritated," we become more and more dominated by depression or anger. We have accepted those limitations; we have ourselves put on our chains (Assagioli, 1971:22).

Once a person has reached the stage where they are aware of the will and its place in activating change they can then move on to the development and training of the will. Once I reached this stage I began to manage the alcoholism and eventually turned away from drink because I had ceased to identify myself with it. Sometimes we misidentify ourselves with things and this misidentification can also lead to an act of will. This was a huge step forward because it meant that I could stay in one place. Eventually I was able to work together with people and was so effective in this that I managed to build up my own employment agency I was able to escape the suffering imposed my identification with drink, eventually this transformed my life and moved me towards working with others. I am now working on a project developing an action plan to help myself and others move beyond grief and loss and to make new lives for themselves and transform their experiences through an act of will. It is at this stage that some experience what Assagioli terms spiritual manifestations, or spiritual experiences that lead to a transcendence of the situation (Wismer-Bowden, 1998).

The Spiritual Will

Assagioli maintains that it is important that the will works with our consciousness because it is helpful in helping us to overcome obstacles and to direct the energies released in the right way. Aspects of our personality may however, get in the way. There is thus a need to focus the will and this is often done through the use of practices such as meditation. For Assagioli the experience of awareness, use and development of the will was that it led to the discovery of the relationship between the I and the transpersonal or higher self (Assagioli, 1973:13).Recognition of the relationship between the self and the transpersonal self is an experience of transcendence. In Assagioli’s work this transcendence was at the same time a spiritual experience and a distinct contrast to everyday experience thus he wrote:

In contrast, the experience of the spiritual is a sense of freedom, of expansion, of communication with other selves and with reality, and there is a sense of Universality. It feels itself at the same time individual and universal (Assagioli, 1965:87).

My own experience of de-identifying myself with alcohol led me, through acts of will, to become successful in the field of business. It also showed me how my shame and guilt over my addiction to drink were not my enemies but my friends because they were the spurs of change. What I have come to realise however, was that giving up drinking and my business success was a result of choices and acts of will that occurred in the realm of my personality. They were first order changes. In order to accomplish these I had to reframe my experiences and reclaim the child within me. Once I went beyond that point and experienced a spiritual growth and a kind of synthesis between my personality and my true or higher self, I discovered my true purpose. This was a second order change in that it had moved me to a higher level and connected me with the transpersonal self. I now know that in order to move on as a spiritual person I need to be able to help others to deal with their own problems and to find their own purpose and spiritual selves. I had realised the meaning of suffering as the self identifying with circumstances. Once I had stopped identifying myself as an alcoholic I had set the processes of change in motion which is why I now desire to help facilitate change in others.

Conclusion

This paper has looked at Assagioli’s concept of the Act of Will. I have, through examples from my own life tried to show how psychosynthesis works. Assagioli’s work is not just some psychological theory but a clear statement of how a person may, through the will establish who they really are. It is this knowledge of my true self that has given me the impetus to walk away from a very successful business to retrain so that I can work with others. This I hope, will facilitate greater change in my own life and help in my desire to facilitate change in others.

Bibliography

Assagioli, R. 1973. The act of will . New York: Harper & Row.
Assagioli, R 1965 Psychosynthesis New York Viking Press
Assagioli, R. 1971 Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings London, Macmillan
Assagioli, R. 1976. Psychosynthesis. New York: Penguin Books.
Assagioli, R. 1991.Transpersonaldevelopment:The dimension beyond psychosynthesis. London: Crucible.
Brown, M. 2001 “A Psychosynthesis Twelve Step Program for Transforming Consciousness: Creative Explorations of Inner Space” Counselling and Values Vol 45
Grosso, M. 2005 “Will Training and Philosophical Practice” Philosophical Practice March, 2005 1(1) pp.23-32
Wismer-Bowden (1998) “Recovery from alcoholism: A spiritual journey” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 1998 19 pp.337-352