Excerpt from an interview by Peter Stewart with Petra Guggisberg Nocelli for the EPA – European Psychosynthesis Association – translated by Valeria Ballarotti.

Assagioli talked a great deal about creativity, in music, in literature, in the arts generally, even in science. Why was creativity so important for Assagioli?

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The human being is creative. Life is creative, that is, it proceeds by means of ever more extensive and complex syntheses. And then, above all, creativity is an intrinsic quality of synthesis, perhaps the one that best defines it. Synthesis is in fact “creation of a new reality, generation of the new”.

Assagioli wrote:

“synthesis is not static balancing on the same plane (Ausgeglichenheit – balancing), but union on a higher plane. Creative, fruitful union.”

It is no coincidence that the whole vision of Psychosynthesis is based on the relationship between polarities: conscious and unconscious; lower unconscious and higher unconscious; multiplicity and unity; feminine aspect of the self (consciousness) and masculine aspect (the will); personal aspect and transpersonal aspect of the Self and so on.

It follows that the quality of the relationships between the polarities, or between the parts of the whole, is the most important thing! It is simple: if the relationship is erotic, that is, if the tension is creative, there is the birth of a new reality that can take place on different planes: not only on the physical plane (as in the case of a child), but also on the emotional, mental and spiritual planes. If, on the other hand, the quality of the relationship between the parties is not erotic, there is destruction, denial, repression, dissociation, etc.

This is why creativity is so important. Let us think, just to give a couple of extremely topical examples, of the devastating effects of the lack of a creative relationship between Man and Nature or between mind and body or even between feminine and masculine.