Alice Bailey and Roberto Assagioli

   

       Just how far can false teachings penetrate into the hearts and minds and souls of men and women—into a society unaware? Quite far. Consider the subtle (or not so subtle) influence of

Alice Bailey on psychotherapy in the 20th and 21st centuries through the work of Roberto Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist, who began developing his theory of psychosynthesis around 1910 and who, from 1930 on, was a close friend and student of Bailey’s.

     Assagioli, known within Bailey’s Arcane School as FCD, received channeled messages and assignments from “The Tibetan,” or "DK," a reference to the Master Djwal Kul, who originally sponsored Bailey, but who, according to the Ascended Master Kuthumi, soon removed his sponsorship due to Bailey’s “intellectual pride and brittleness” and failure to surrender to the will of God. (1)



     In Al Mankoff’s article, Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis and the Esoteric Roots of Transpersonal Psychology, we read:  



 ...Perhaps the disciple of greatest world-wide fame of all 42 disciples was Doctor Roberto Assagioli, Italian psychotherapist, said to be the father of Psychology of the Soul, Psychosynthesis. He is shown in the volume as “FCD” or “Freedom from Ties, Chelaship and Detachment.” 

    Mankoff goes on to describe several of the messages and instructions Assagioli received from “The Tibetan” (DK) via Bailey regarding several projects and ideas regarding the field of psychology, stating that, “Here, then, was the spark that lit the flame of Psychosynthesis and Transpersonal Psychology.”



      In his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery:Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof mentions Assagioli and Bailey and The Tibetan in his section on Dimensions in Consciousness:



      An entity who called himself the Tibetan was acknowledged by Alice Bailey as the real author of a large series of her spiritual writings. Roberto Assagioli credited the same entity as the source of his psychological system of psychosynthesis. (2)



      And, in The Future of New Religious Movements, edited by David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, Assagioli is also mentioned in connection with Alice Bailey:



... Lesser known is Roberto Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist who absorbed Theosophy and especially its revisionist presentation produced by Alice Bailey. His thought and the professionals who practice his system, psychosynthesis, have become thoroughly intertwined with Bailey’s Arcane School and its offshoots. (3)



      Just as the Ascended Master Kuthumi warns of the “false teachings subtly woven into the work of Alice Bailey,” Mankoff tells how deeply enmeshed Assagioli was with Bailey and The Tibetan; Grof ties Bailey and The Tibetan to Assagioli and psychosynthesis, and Bromley and Hammond, like Kuthumi, mention the interweaving—the intertwining—of psychosynthesis and Alice Bailey’s Arcane School (and her “Tibetan”).






1. Pearls of Wisdom, Vol. 19 No. 5—Kuthumi and the Brothers of the Golden Robe—February 1, 1976, The True Teacher and the False Teacher. (Pearls of Wisdom: 1958-1996, First Edition CD-ROM, (Corwin Springs, Montana: Church Universal and Triumphant, 1997) 

2. Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration, (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology), (State University of New York, 1988), page 123. 

3. David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, The Future of New Religious Movements, (Mercer University Press, 1987), page 55.