My guest today is Allan Frater, a psychotherapist and teacher at the Psychosynthesis Trust in London.
Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal or psychospiritual psychology, in which the spiritual or soulful is integrated with the psychological. It has its origins in the work of Dr Roberto Assagioli, an early pioneer of psychoanalysis which he studied under Freud and as a contemporary of Carl Jung. On returning to Italy, Assagioli went beyond psychoanalysis in the formation of psychosynthesis, which included influences from his life-long interest in eastern traditions such as Buddhism, as well as the esoteric western traditions, such as alchemy, Neo-Platonism and kabbalah.However, psychosynthesis was presented as a secular psychology and an empirical science of human subjectivity. The topic of our discussion today will be the origins, aims and methods of psychosynthesis, as well the emphasis that Allan has been developing in his teaching which he calls, ‘wild imagination’.
I really enjoyed listening to this podcast, especially as I used to know Allan back in the days when we were both in the Western Buddhist Order. There is obviously a huge amount of overlap between Psychosynthesis and Middle Way thinking. I particularly liked Allan’s image of imagination not being ‘in a jamjar’. That’s a really useful image for one point I keep trying to make about God and other archetypes – that to think of them archetypally (i.e. in terms of the imagination) is not reductive and not ‘just’ internal. It’s not catching God in a jamjar, but on the contrary leaving him just as grand and wild as he was before – in fact more so if we stop trying to pin him down into ‘beliefs’.
Hi Robert, glad you liked the podcast and it was good to join up again with yourself…i think the last time i went to Padmaloka retreat centre was when we both gave talks on an Order weekend, it all rather wonderfully unravelled from there. No regrets.
I completely agree, the gods are not beliefs, they are not thoughts.
There is a section in Jung’s autobiography where he describes walking up and down his garden with a character of imagination called Philemon, a robbed figure with a limp, who educates Jung that there are things in the psyche which he did not produce, which produce themselves and which have a life of their own (Memories, Dreams, Reflections; p207). Hence he went on to develop his appreciation of the autonomy of the psyche…a big inspiration for ‘wild imagination’…
Many thanks for the podcast invite. I enjoyed preparing for it and then doing it with Barry, who was great…maybe we could do it again next year going further into ‘wild imagination’?
All the best
Allan Frater
That sounds a good idea about the Wild Imagination podcast, Allan!
Hi Robert
You came up with an idea a while back about a “somone’s” beard (as opposed to Occam’s Razor which seemed to express the opposite of Allan’s jam jar, could you remind me of that?
Thanks
Barry
Do you mean the principle of Heron’s Beard? That’s in ‘Middle Way Philosophy 3: The Integration of Meaning’, and the idea is taken from John Heron’s book ‘Confessions of a Janus Brain’ (an interestingly weird book recommended to me by Peter Goble a while ago). That’s the idea that there is no limit to how much meaning we can generate: we can just let it grow and proliferate. That’s an image that works in terms of experience, I think, but not in terms of the brain, where there’s actually a lot of synaptic pruning going on as well as connecting. It’s making a slightly different point from Allan’s jamjar, which is about whether meaning is just internal. Heron’s Beard is just about the open amount of meaning we can have – in contrast to belief, that needs to be barbered from time to time.
Yeah, that’s it. The connection I make with Allan’s Jam jar is that the jar limits imagination whereas Heron’s Beard implies there are no limits to it.