A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

R FOR REVELATION

This coming Friday will be National Holocaust Day. A chilling subject. Where was God during the Shoah? - is the tormented question.

One great teacher, Emil Fackenheim said that the aspect of the divine that can be heard through it all is the Commanding Voice. Hugo Gryn used to say that every one of the commandments was systematically broken. So the commanding voice resonated as never before.

Like the revelation which came to Moses at the Burning Bush –from the midst of the fire which burned yet did not consume the bush. So Revelation was present in the Shoah. It was aimed at the destruction not only of Jews but of Judaism in its entirety.

It began with the burning of books.

Not only religious books. Everything with Jewish connections was consigned to the flames. So much that had a contribution to make to healing the human spirit. Freud’s psychoanalysis was banned as being “Jewish Science”.

This week I gave a lecture at Manchester University on a little know but profoundly influential disciple and critic of Freud, the Italian psychotherapist Roberto Assagioli, founder of the therapy known as Psychosynthesis. What interests me especially is that he also founded the Italian Movement for Progressive Judaism, which he led in Florence until his death in 1974 at the age of 86. For me he is a personal revelation.

Assagioli came from a Jewish family in Venice, qualified as a doctor, in1910 studied Psychoanalysis in Switzerland where he became friendly with Carl Gustav Jung, returned to Italy and founded the Institute of Psychosynthesis in Rome. Psychosynthesis seeks to provide what is lacking in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is interested in what Freud called making the unconscious conscious. That was Assagioli’s work too. For him though, there was a Higher Unconscious in the human personality, as well as a Lower Unconscious.

If the Lower Unconscious is like a Recycle Bin into which we repress all that we can’t deal with consciously from childhood onward, shame, guilt, rage, fears but which percolates through in our everyday behaviour, our talk and our dreams, the Higher Unconscious contains all the potential for growth, our untapped creativity, our sense of beauty, of altruism, our unexpressed intellectual capacity – all the resources which we would love to access, but we repress it through lack of self-confidence or other defences which hold us back. Again think of the commanding voice to the self-doubting Moses.

It is the sublime, spiritual side of us, which we all have. It culminates in a Higher Self of which our ordinary everyday conscious self is but a reflection, like a mirror reflecting the sun. Our Higher Self moreover exists within what was called by Jung and Assagioli the Collective Unconscious, which is like a kind of mental gene pool. Just as the human body is a museum of natural history which tells the story of the whole of human evolution, so the personality contains within it the whole of human psychological development from the earliest prehistory. Our art, our literature, our dreams and fantasies contain a language of symbolism which is universal to every culture on earth since time immemorial.

Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis therapy works by empowering people, through counselling, through imaginative dialogue, meditation and guided imagery, to log on to aspects of the personality – or subpersonalities, to overcome inner conflicts, to achieve integration between the unconscious and the conscious both lower and higher. It is not only for times of crisis and pain. It is also for personal development, for growth towards a higher vision of yourself.

Unlike much of psychotherapy it includes your spiritual growth. There were other great Jewish figures who worked along these lines: Abraham Maslow, who pioneered work with healthy, self-actualizing people as he called them and with their peak experiences. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist of the concentration camps who discovered through his Shoah experience that among our basic needs, along with food and water was the need for meaning and purpose in life; with it one could survive even without food and water, without it one simply could not survive. There were others like Erich Fromm the social psychologist, who described himself as an atheist mystic and Fritz Perls the founder of Gestalt Psychotherapy, who was estranged from religious Judaism.

Assagioli was unique. He found deep inspiration in his Judaism, and in Zen Buddhism, Sufi and Hindu mysticism, and believed in different faiths learning from each other, which one of the aims of his Italian Movement for Progressive Judaism. So his Judaism and his therapy of the human spirit went hand in hand.

Psychosynthesis, although it was born not long after psychoanalysis, did not take off for another almost half century. Assagioli’s work only became significant world-wide in the 1960’s.

So it is a success story which has taken a long time to unfold. And that is central to its teaching. Self-discovery is a life long process. Within every problem we have with life and with ourselves there is a solution. Within our conflicts there are strengths. The same is true of external challenges. One of Assagioli’s colleagues was Piero Ferucci. One day he got called up to do army service. You could defer for a few years which he was able to do on grounds that it interfered with his clinical work. But eventually it caught up with him and he was drafted. He was deeply despondent about it. Assagioli’s reaction surprised him. He said ‘great – this will be a revelation to you; now you will learn how to collaborate with the inevitable’. He was right. Ferucci reported that he learned how to meditate in a noisy dormitory, how to utilize the time between one chore and another to read and take notes, how to waste time without feeling guilty, and finally he said”that realizations of a higher consciousness are not tied to this or that situation but can occur at any place and at any time.

Never was this more true of Assagioli himself. His institute in Rome was closed by the fascist government which was critical of him being a Jew an Internationalist and a pacifist. His pacifism consisted in his helping people find peace within. He was imprisoned by Mussolini and spent long periods in solitary confinement.

He turned those periods into what he called a ‘spiritual retreat’ And he wrote that he found in it ‘ a sense of boundlessness, of no separation from all that is, a merging of the self with the whole, an overflowing or effusion in all directions, like an ever expanding sphere. A sense of universal love.’

That is how, in the worst possible times, there can come a personal revelation.