Psychosynthesis for coaching today
Psychosynthesis is an integrative, holistic and depth psychology that builds upon the foundations of psychoanalytic, Jungian, humanistic and developmental psychologies.
By holistic, we mean that this is a psychology that concerns the whole human being, the self in all its dimensions, all levels of consciousness including post-rational or spiritual levels of self-experience (in common with transpersonal psychologies), both healthy and pathological states. Within this context, the focus is on how to help people realise their full potential and actualise themselves in the world, as well as how to address issues of identity, purpose, meaning and values and negotiate crisis in whatever form it appears in people’s lives.
Psychosynthesis is also a psychology of human development, illuminating the different phases of how the self develops, and guiding the synthesis of our disparate parts, with the goal of becoming more whole as human beings. This is very important for coaching, which is about helping relatively healthy and functional people actualise their potential and achieve their goals. At the same time, the depth dimensions of the psychology will enable you to deal with neurotic and dysfunctional aspects of your clients that become barriers to success, working at sub-conscious and un-conscious levels which behavioural (e.g. CBT, NLP, TA, neuro-scientific) approaches only address superficially.
The holistic aspect is what sets Psychosynthesis trained therapists apart from their more conventional psychoanalytic colleagues. They hold awareness of their clients higher self as they guide them to both self-realise and self-actualise, as well as working at regressive levels to heal past wounding or address particular pathologies.
However, given the origins and nature of therapy or counselling, negative regressive connotations are difficult to dispel. Coaching is set within a more positive context with an absence of stigma, given its orientation towards future goals rather than healing the past. With the increased popularity of coaching and the growth of the profession, the time has come for more positive and holistic psychologies. We believe that Psychosynthesis psychology is at least as relevant to coaching as it has been to therapy.
Psychosynthesis is also a living and evolving psychology for today. Psychosynthesis Coaching is engaged in an ongoing process that (i) responds to the emerging needs of leaders, organisation and society, and (ii) integrates and absorbs the latest learning in psychology and related fields, especially neuroscience and neuropsychology, but also developmental psychology and integral philosophy.