Aleister Crowley

[David Morris]

http://www.oneworld.org/revision/ip.html

An Introduction to
Integrative Psychosynthesis

We also see our Counselling and Psychotherapy training programmes as 
integrative in the bringing together of the human and the spiritual to 
encourage the healing of the split within ourselves and our culture. Too 
often transpersonal psychotherapies have been ungrounded in their approach 
and shied away from the dark side of human nature, focusing instead on 
potential and spiritual longings. While this may be necessary to balance a 
cultural repression of the sublime, it is dangerously seductive to inflate 
students with promises of their potential without also confronting them with 
their limitations and shadow impulses.

Spiritual psychologies have the inherent dangers of confusing spiritual 
teaching with psychotherapy, which can lead to the therapist's inflation, 
the spiritualisation of painful feelings and the inadequate attention to 
psychopathology. Too much focus on potential also encourages a form of 
psychological or spiritual materialism, in which students or clients believe 
they have to change, to grow, to improve in order to measure up to certain 
idealised standards. Such spiritual fantasies are themselves a form of 
Promethean pathology which need to be balanced through the appreciation of 
ordinary desires and pleasures as soulful.

Integrative Psychosynthesis does not polarise pathology and the soul as if 
one had to overcome one's pathology before encountering one's soul, but sees 
the experience of 'soul' as emerging from the confrontation with one's dark 
as well as with one's light aspects. In this context 'Synthesis' now becomes 
a healing principle - both a reconnection of polarities that have been 
divided within the human psyche such as light and dark, good and bad, but 
also the split through which we have become alienated from nature as a 
source of divine inspiration and nourishment. This healing principle is held 
in the image of the tree which has grown roots in the dark depths which can 
balance the inspirational reaching up of its branches into the light.


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