Criticism
Psychosynthesis, for better or worse, 'has always been on the fringes of the "official" therapy world', and it 'is only recently that the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis and group analysis have been introduced into the training and practice of psychosynthesis psychotherapy'.
As a result, the movement has been at times exposed to the dangers of fossilisation and cultism, so that on occasion, having 'started out reflecting the high-minded spiritual philosophy of its founder, became more and more authoritarian, more and more strident in its conviction that psychosynthesis was the One Truth'.
A more technical danger is that premature concern with the transpersonal may hamper dealing with personal psychosynthesis: for example, 'evoking serenity...might produce a false sense of well-being and security'. Practitioners have noted how 'inability to...integrate the superconscious contact with everyday experience easily leads to inflation', and have spoken of 'an "Icarus complex", the tendency whereby spiritual ambition fails to take personality limitations into account and causes all sorts of psychological difficulties'.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)