by William Bento, Ph.D.: Rudolf Steiner’s four lectures given in Berlin, Germany in November 1910 entitled Psychosophy: Wisdom of the Soul can be found in the larger Anthroposophic Press 1999 publication entitled, A Psychology of Body, Soul and Spirit by Rudolf Steiner. These lectures can be considered an attempt to lay a phenomenological foundation for a re-evaluation of the emergence and significance of psychology. Steiner’s approach to the psyche is not only theoretical, rather primarily phenomenological, based on his very close observations of human development. He draws upon his direct experience and philosophical discipline to articulate the inherent concepts involved in understanding the nature of the human soul. Although Steiner wrote extensively about the origin of the human soul along with the origin of the cosmos, these lectures are accessible without references to his vast range of knowledge on other topics.

In order to gain an appreciation of Steiner’s contribution to psychology I propose we place Steiner within the context of his contemporaries who blazed the trail for transpersonal psychology at the outset of the 20th century – Carl Gustav Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and William James. Within this historical context we may sense the genius and vision of Rudolf Steiner. Reference to others can also be made – to Alfred Adler and Otto Rank among the contemporaries of Jung – as well as many progressive modern theorists of psychology – including Abraham Maslow, Donald Winnicott, Carl Rogers, Hameed Almaas, Stanislav Grof, Michael Washburn and Ken Wilber. But the transpersonal psychology foundations come from these three – Jung, Assagioli, and James.

Carl Gustav Jung founded analytical psychology, also referred to as depth psychology, as an alternative to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to the unconscious. For Jung the personal unconscious was not the deepest layer of the psyche. It was the collective unconscious realm of primordial archetypes that determined the core of the psyche. He was less concerned about coping with neurosis and the sexually related Oedipal Complex than with finding the meaningfulness of life, which binds one’s Self to the divine. Freud’s pivotal idea of the pain and pleasure principle was replaced by Jung’s principle of suffering as a way to enlightenment. Although Jung could justify the pain/pleasure principle as a dominant factor in the first half of life, he was far more interested in the second half of life and the mid-life crises that often spurned the way from suffering to enlightenment. For Jung the “Holy Grail” of depth psychology was a path of individuation that led to the transcendent function of the Self or in other terms the Christos of alchemists, such as Jacob Boehme. Jung’s view of the transcendent function involved an activation of a symbol, which unfolds in pictorial, tactile, or auditory statements and images that represents a synthesis of opposing elements and renders a resolution to the conscious conflict at the root of one’s suffering. The transcendent function of the psyche operates as the key organ of perception through which the mystical unitary reality is experienced. This view gives credence to the idea of a transpersonal psychology.

Any unbiased examination of Jung’s Collected Works will discover the intimate linkage between depth psychology and the hosts of mystical revelations found within the great religions throughout the world. Even though Jung was not opposed to notions of his work as being of a transpersonal nature he did resist any reference to his work as being religious, despite his experiences as the son of a Christian minister. For him the existence of God was irrefutable. It was the complex relationship human souls form to the realm of divinity and God that intriqued and compelled him to seek for a more scientific method of investigating the “Great Mystery”.

“I make no transcendental statements. I am essentially empirical, as I have stated more than once. I am dealing with psychic phenomena and not with metaphysical assertions. Within the frame of psychic events I find the fact of the belief in God. It says: ‘God is’. This is the fact I am concerned with. I am not concerned with the truth or untruth of God’s existence.” (Jung, C.G., 1975, C.W. Letters, vol. 2, p. 570)

Within the perspective of depth psychology there is the concept of the Pleroma, a concept of the All that invokes the Abyss. Both fear and ecstasy co-exist in the Abyss. It is quite similar to Martin Buber’s “divine Void,” where the spirit of the human being meets the spirit of the divine. Here the wrestling with Demons and dancing with Angels takes place. Jung asserts that a new intrapsychic core is formed when the apparent opposites of negative and positive experiences are unified and resolved. Out of this unitary reality the Self emerges to guide the further development of the individual. Such is Jung’s view into a trans-personal psychology.

Inasmuch as Jung represents a psychology of the depths, Roberto Assagioli represents a psychology of the heights. His formulation of Psychosynthesis embraces the reality of the many selves, the sub-personalities out of which we identify our subjective experiences. This, however, is not the core of his psychology. Assagioli’s primary aim was to synthesize the many fragments of one’s true Self. His term for the unified self was the Higher Self, an authentic self that is capable of transcending the many and varied mundane personal identifications we make in order to transact ordinary reality. Through a process of dis-identification one is led to a creative void where a bridge to the spiritual is made. Assagioli states crossing it into the metaphysical realms of a non-personal reality leads to the encounter with the Higher Self, that authentic Spirit Self.

Roberto Assagioli’s background in Theosophical studies and other esoteric/mystical traditions allowed him to synthesize many soul disciplines into a Psychosynthesis. For him Psychosynthesis was not about applying esoterically advanced techniques but about learning to live with a vision that came from deep within. In his Psychosynthesis Oval diagram, wherein he maps the psyche, Assagioli introduces three realms of the unconscious – lower, middle and collective unconscious, with a realm he identifies as superconscious, wherein “we receive all inspiration and illumination.”

Psychosynthesis is essentially a psychology of the will that seeks to operate from higher aspects of the will than instinct, habit and desire. Assagioli describes a path of will from recognition of the existence of will, to the realization of having a will, to being a will. The alignment between one’s personality and one’s Transpersonal Self or Higher Self is the cardinal goal of Psychosynthesis, achievable only through an understanding and mastery of the will.

 

William James, the American pragmatic philosopher and first well-known author of and advocate for psychology, posited a psychology that could embrace the immanence of divinity and the variety of humanity’s religious experiences. James sought for the dynamic principles operative in the psyche. Although his approach was based on a pragmatic phenomenological and philosophical perspective, James was constantly investigating the experiences that transcended the normal set of behaviors, attitudes, and values. He finally concluded there existed a realm of experiences wherein the individual’s sense of self became wider and capable of glimpsing the divine. He called this the Wider Self, wherein the immanence of divinity expands one’s consciousness into realms of the religious and mystical. These experiences were transformative and gave ample evidence for the credibility of a transpersonal psychology.

Jung, Assagioli, and James were in agreement about the existence of a realm of divinity. Each one of them expressed how important it was for the human soul to embrace the journey toward participating in the spirit of divinity – whether it be through plummeting into the depths or scaling the heights or expanding into the widths. Each of their views of transpersonal psychology can be seen as valid and foundational. Yet, each view taken to an extreme can also be seen as one-sided. None of the three pioneers openly introduced a cosmological basis to the human soul, although each did infer it; none of the three pioneers stressed the reality of higher beings involved in the complex dramas of the soul, although each described dynamic forces at play in soul life; none of the three pioneers addressed the concepts of karma and reincarnation nor explicate the concept of the streams of time.

Rudolf Steiner described in detail the cosmological origin, nature and destiny of the human soul. He was adamant about denouncing the mere archetypal and symbolic references to the interplay of soul life, finding there a potential trap for the personality. In the place of those phenomena, he discussed the many levels of beings, lower elemental beings, adversary beings, and higher beings involved in soul life. Steiner also introduced radical concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the multiplicity of time. Unique to Steiner is his exposition of a stream of time coming from the future that constantly influences the present as much as it is shaped by the past. Steiner’s psychology is aimed at the path of self-development or more precisely, aimed at fostering a path of initiation. For Steiner reaching the Self was a matter of embracing one’s sense of the divine “I Am” and recognizing one’s participation in the great evolutionary process of the cosmos. He did not dismiss the focus on a psychology of the ego, but he was critical of approaches in psychology that were exclusively about the ego function. Steiner advocated a spiritual approach to psychology that encompassed the mystery of the depths, the heights, and the widths. There is little in the approaches to psychology by Jung, Assagioli and James that is not addressed and indicated for further development in Steiner’s approach. A synthetic approach uniting both transcendence and immanence is found throughout Steiner’s Psychosophy. His contribution to transpersonal psychology lie in his extensive knowledge of the spiritual dimensions the soul is engaged in from pre-birth, throughout all phases of life, at death and beyond. He not only refers to ancient wisdom traditions regarding the soul, as most transpersonal psychology does, but he adds insights from his own spiritual scientific research.

Rather than basing the framework of Psychosophy on psychopathology, Steiner emphasizes the healthy development of the soul’s faculties and the evolutionary path the modern soul is traversing. Steiner stresses the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the senses as a pre-requisite for comprehending soul life. In his view the physical body lives in the dimensions of space and the soul lives in the dimension of time, but both are in constant interaction lending credence to the importance of psychosomatic dynamics. The vital link between the two is the sentient body’s relationship to the sentient soul, a link that transmits sense perception into sensation. The sentient body in Steiner’s view is both the sheath of the soul and of the organs of perception to the external world, whereas the sentient soul is the portal into an interiority of soul experiences.

There are many ways to introduce the premises of Psychosophy. However, the four lectures of the Psychosophy series may be a sound point of departure. Steiner articulated a phenomenological journey of soul processes beginning with sense perceptions and then proceeded on to describe in some detail seven stages of an archetypal soul process. What I shall present is not a literal account of Steiner’s words, but a view that is embedded and implied in these lectures. The schema I am presenting is meant to give the reader a clear sequential process of how the soul becomes activated and enlivened by being embodied and open to the objective world. Each soul process is far more complex than what I shall convey in this presentation, yet the core concepts should be sufficient to gain an overall impression of the soul life as conceived by Steiner’s Psychosophy.

Soul Processes

Soul Process # 1: Attention to sense perceptions in the external world establish the first process. The unconscious will in the soul streams out to grasp the world. This desire for experience starts with an instinctive urge to respond to external stimuli and an impulse to acquire some degree of knowing the external world one exist within. Although the sense organs are a given due to the innate function of the sentient body, the actual attention that focuses the sense organs is not given. Attention is a matter of ego-focused consciousness. It arises as a pre-disposition of the soul’s longing for participating in the world. Without sufficient interest in the world, the soul remains inactivated and lifeless. By exercising interest and focusing attention the windows and doors of the soul open and invite the world into its sphere of beingness. What was once outside becomes inside.

 

Soul Process # 2: All that is taken into the soul through the portal of the senses becomes sensation. Sensation, as an activity of the senses, is the enlivening of the sentient soul, the living of the sense perceptions within the unconscious feeling life. Although a wide range of sensations is possible with each sense perception, a basic quality of experience to each sense perception can be determined along a continuum from sympathy to antipathy. This is not too different from Freud’s pleasure/pain principle. The key in this soul process is to be mindful of the quality of a sensation, for it shapes one’s feeling life by establishing a relationship to the specific sense perception and the world in general. The confusion that can occur in this process of the soul is the distortion of the objective sense perception with one’s own subjective projections of sympathy or antipathy about the object of the sense perception.

Soul Process # 3: Steiner explains in great detail how sensations are transformed into visualizations. Adding to the sensation an unconscious idea, which represents the experience the soul has just undergone, forms an inner picture of the object of the sense perception. Much of what we consider is active thinking is usually nothing more than a stream of already-formed thoughts or concepts that have been built up through visualizations of the past. With conscious effort this process can be elevated into creating a relationship to the world of concepts. It does, however, require that we discipline our thinking to become an objective perception of the present rather than merely a rehearsal of the past.

Soul Process # 4: The “I” becomes involved in the act of judging the quality and value of our experiences. The act of discernment that Steiner refers to as judging is always concerned with the consequences of an idea, an emotion and/or a behavior, whether it is about one’s self or another. Judging is an evaluative process of weighing the essential from the non-essential, the true from the false, the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, the good from the bad, etc. It is in this stage of the soul process that conscious decisions are made and motivations for new activities are consolidated.

Soul Process # 5: When attention has been given to the four previous stages of the soul process, then the interiority of the soul becomes evident through the power and character of memory. This is an identification process with our experiences. What we have not identified with in our experiences is usually not remembered. Out of this memory process we retain a sense of identity. Our sense of “I” lives within the context of our meaningful memories. Yet memory remains one of the great mysteries of the human soul. Why we forget, why we cannot recall a name when we want to, why we receive flashes of memories without our will – all are part of this mystery of memory. It points quite clearly to the mystery of where the “I” resides.

Soul Process # 6: To the degree our “I” has given meaning to our experiences, which are living in the stream of our memory, we can tell the story of our life. This story we call our biography. It is the result of our capacity to exercise judgment and recollection, to determine the true nature of things experienced. In this stage of the soul process we express how we think about our lives and the world we live in. These expressions through story are usually a significant characterization of our personality.

Soul Process # 7: In this stage of the soul process a thirst to change one’s state of being arises. The aspiration to initiate self-development, to become more than what one is in the present, takes hold. This feeling for changing our lives has within it the deep intention to become all we are capable of being. Within this feeling there is a discontent and a sense of boredom about maintaining a state of being that is not growing and changing. Self-development becomes a yearning to embody ideals and manifest possibilities that reflect a certain self-mastery. In a Jungian vernacular it is the striving for individuation. The outcome of the self-development at this seventh stage of the soul process becomes the substantive reality of the spiritualization of the soul. That substantive reality can be termed meeting one’s sense of destiny. Regardless of how this destiny is defined the individual at this stage is aware of his or her creative genius and is capable of making a contribution to others and the world. At this stage the conscious will to enact one’s resolves becomes manifest as deeds.

Summarizing the seven soul processes:

1) Sense Perceptions

2) Sensations

3) Visualizations

4) Judging

5) Memory

6) Personality

7) Self-Development

 

Rudolf Steiner shared two important breakthroughs in his ongoing spiritual scientific research in his lectures entitled The Riddle of Humanity (1916). The first was his discovery of the interrlationship between the bodily system of nerve sense with the soul’s faculty of thinking, the bodily system of respiration with the soul’s faculty of feeling, and the bodily system of the metabolic activities with the soul’s faculty of willing. These associations establish a pivotal understanding for psychosomatics. This aspect of Steiner’s work will be dealt with in future writings. The second discovery was the lawfulness of biological/organic development. He articulated seven archetypal life processes. These fundamental ideas have become essential to all anthroposophical medical and therapeutic disciplines. Although this formulation was six years after the Psychosophy lectures were given, the seeds of Steiner’s thinking can be identified in his lectures of Psychosophy, wherein he spoke out of a purely phenomenological orientation. The correspondences of the seven life processes and his implicit progression of soul processes starting from sense perception is quite striking.

Corresponding the seven soul processes to the seven life processes identified by Steiner:

1) Sense Perceptions = Breathing

2) Sensations = Warming

3) Visualizations = Nourishing

4) Judging = Secreting

5) Memory = Maintaining

6) Personality = Growing

7) Self-Development = Reproducing

 

These correspondences will be explicated more fully in a future work. For now, let us look at how the seven soul processes interface with modern psychological typology.

Let us return to Steiner’s view about the critical nature of sense perception. He places before us the proposition that all sense perception, which brings us into direct contact with the external world, is bound to result in an experience of joy or sorrow. The background to this phenomenon he asserts is the fact that the soul meets every sense perception with a desire that is driven by love or hate for contact with the external world. In human life desires are rarely ever fully satisfied. The passion for the experience usually carries with it an innate suffering, the unfulfilled desire. The other aspect to this phenomenon is the soul’s constant longing for reasoning. Inasmuch as we would all like to assume our reasoning faculties are healthy and accurate, the reality is few of us possess such reasoning. When our reasoning is faulty, we fall into errors and out of such errors we display our dumbness, which can also lead to suffering.

In many other lectures regarding the nature of the soul/spirit life Steiner points to this phenomenon as being rooted in the pre-earthly life. There he describes how the soul eventually experiences an intensity of love for incarnation. This love is the universal resolve to undergo development in the only place it is possible for the soul – the Earth. There is also the innate wisdom in the soul to unite heaven and earth, spirit and body. Hence love and wisdom can be metaphorically called the true wings of the soul.

Lacking the memory of these pre-earthly experiences of love and wisdom at birth the human soul bears the cross of forgetfulness and throughout life undergoes experiences of passion, of pathos. As we know from the myth of Psyche and Eros, the human soul is destined to live through suffering and learn how to reclaim the joy of life. In these experiences of pathos we find ourselves subject to psychopathology. Soul processes can become distorted and be diagnosed as psychopathology. The brief associations and descriptions that follow are not intended to be comprehensive nor purely clinical, but to give one a sense for the coherence in how Psychosophy can be applied to an understanding of a wide range of psychopathology.

Sense Perception Distortions

Sense perception distortions are the result of the excessive interest in the sense organs in the external world or the internal world. The instrument of sense perception itself can trap the “me,” as navigator of attention. This renders the “I” powerless. When the sense organ can only grasp an object of sense perception and is not able to release it, it traps the “me,” and the power of attention is then fixated upon the object of sense perception. In this experience the soul and the single object of perception become one unitary reality. This is a characterization of Autism. When the sense organ can only receive internal stimuli of fragmented memory images or exaggeratedly sensate imagery, then the power of attention is not sustained. In this experience the soul becomes a realm of chaotic possibilities, both exhilarating and terrifying. This is a characterization of Psychosis.

In both extreme cases the inability of the “I” to take hold of the will results in a type of soul paralysis, wherein the body tends to be a predominant force in shaping one’s experiences. For the autistic, an unconscious willing to identify with an object of sense perception distorts the soul’s perception of reality. For the psychotic an unconscious willing to identify with internal stimuli and psychoid imagery distorts the soul’s perception of reality.

 

Sensations Distortions

Sensations are the after effects of sense perceptions. It can be likened to the body’s feeling response, albeit unconscious, to the object of sense perception. The habitual tendencies to respond with sympathy (I like it) or antipathy (I do not like it) play out at this stage of internalizing the object of sense perception. Aspects of desire can easily and impulsively turn into feelings of love (sympathy) or hate (antipathy). Without the attentiveness of the “I” to identify the experience objectively the soul becomes subject to emotional waves often unpredictably caught up in polarities of feeling. Herein lies the source of a particularly dominant psychopathology. In fact, all Affective Disorders can be found to have this overwhelming distortion in the interpretation or processing of internal sensations that are fundamentally unconscious and unmanageable. Bi-Polar Disorders, with their characteristic swings from mania to depression, are a clear manifestation of distorted sensations driving the soul life into either wild risky behaviors or a flat affect of inactivity and despair. This distortion can be tracked in a somatic manner by assessing the changes in an individual’s biochemistry.

Manic tendencies can be related to excessive sympathies, wherein the individual is swept away by feelings of euphoria and delusions. In these cases the “I” is less incarnated, and therefore unable to regulate the high degree of emotional affect being expressed about external matters. Depressive tendencies can be related to excessive antipathies, often turned inward. The plight of the depressive type is an engulfment by dark feelings about every aspect of life.

Visualizations Distortions

At this third stage of soul processes lives the innate desire to attach visualizations to sensations. At times one single sensation can give rise to a complex of visualizations. Visualizations, as unconscious thought processes, are the soul’s desire to make meaning of its experiences. Unless the “I” is active in one’s thinking, a plethora of ideas is bound to flow out and stimulate a host of visualizations without having any realistic relationship to the external world. Rather than confronting the polarities stemming from sympathies and antipathies the soul is confronted by ideas that are either hot and inflamed, or cold and lifeless.

With the hot pole we discover the driven ideas of the Obsessive-Compulsive and/or the Addictive Abuser of Substances. The ideas become so overpowering that any considerations of logic or consequences are dismissed from decision-making. The compelling idea becomes the whole reality, focus, and meaning of one’s life. Any integrity between the external situation and the meaning associated to it is compromised. Reality becomes a subjective distortion. The cold pole conditions the soul to dispositions of isolation. Individuals with Paranoid and Schizoid tendencies seem to flourish in this inner state of fear and rigidity. Once again, the internally produced false idea reigns supreme over any objective reality. The lack of correspondence between objective sense perception with subjective visualizations distorts reality and promotes a confusion of soul that can be a dreadful agony of exclusion from normative healthy everyday life events and interpersonal interactions.

Judgment Distortions

The power of the “I,” as an executive function of the soul, administers judgment of experiences and all things the soul comes into relationship with throughout life. Steiner refers to judging as an evaluative act, weighing the many sides to any situation and initiating the appropriate action to be taken. Decisions that are made with the full presence of the “I” become purpose-driven motives, motives that determine the way one lives his or her life. Every decision we make has consequences. This awareness gives credence to the phrase, “consciousness is painful.” Yet, accountability is part of the human condition. For this reason alone, the “I” must also be capable of bearing compassion. Otherwise judging can become a heartless activity. To repeat, true judging is heartful and compassionate in its nature.

If the “I” is not capable of being embodied and single-minded in its attention, the soul might become vulnerable to unconsciously incorporating many pseudo “I’s”. Whether this condition is brought on by trauma or sleepiness of soul, the results are the same. A splintering of the sense of Self occurs and in such fragmentation, Disassociation Identity Disorders manifest. On the other spectrum to disassociation identity disorder is the Sociopath, the one who does not factor into his or her decisions the consequences to the actions they take. The sociopath exercises power over others to the same degree that the disassociated individual experiences powerlessness.

Memory Distortions

In the April 2012 issue of Harvard’s Medical School Health Publication seven types of normal memory problems were identified and explored. As we age these normal memory problems tend to become exaggerated. The seven types are as follows:

 

1. Transience

This is the tendency to forget facts or events over time. You are most likely to forget information soon after you learn it. However, memory has a use-it-or-lose-it quality: Memories that are called up and used frequently are least likely to be forgotten. Although transience might seem like a sign of memory weakness, brain scientists regard it as beneficial because it clears the brain of unused memories, making way for newer, more useful ones.

2. Absentmindedness

This type of forgetting occurs when you don’t pay close enough attention. You forget where you just put your pen because you didn’t focus on where you put it in the first place. You were thinking of something else (or, perhaps, nothing in particular), so your brain didn’t encode the information securely. Absentmindedness also involves forgetting to do something at a prescribed time, like taking your medicine or keeping an appointment.

3. Blocking

Someone asks you a question and the answer is right on the tip of your tongue – you know that you know it, but you just can’t think of it. This is a familiar example of blocking, the temporary inability to retrieve a memory. In many cases, the barrier is a memory similar to the one you’re looking for, and you retrieve the wrong one. This competing memory is so intrusive that you can’t think of the memory you want. Scientists think that memory blocks become more common with age and that they account for the trouble older people have remembering other people’s names. Research shows that people are able to retrieve about half of the blocked memories within just a minute.

4. Misattribution

Misattribution occurs when you remember something accurately in part, but misattribute some detail, like the time, place, or person involved. Another kind of misattribution occurs when you believe a thought you had was totally original when, in fact, it came from something you had previously read or heard but had forgotten about. This sort of misattribution explains cases of unintentional plagiarism, in which a writer passes off some information as original when he or she actually read it somewhere before.

As with several other kinds of memory lapses, misattribution becomes more common with age. As you age, you absorb fewer details when acquiring information because you have somewhat more trouble concentrating and processing information rapidly. And as you grow older, your memories grow older as well. Old memories are especially prone to misattribution.

5. Suggestibility

Suggestibility is the vulnerability of your memory to the power of suggestion – information that you learn about an occurrence after the fact becomes incorporated into your memory of the incident, even though you did not experience these details. Although little is known about exactly how suggestibility works in the brain, the suggestion fools your mind into thinking it’s a real memory.

6. Bias

Even the sharpest memory isn’t a flawless snapshot of reality. In your memory, your perceptions are filtered by your personal biases – experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge, and even your mood at the moment. Your biases affect your perceptions and experiences when they’re being encoded in your brain. And when you retrieve a memory, your mood and other biases at that moment can influence what information you actually recall.

Although everyone’s attitudes and preconceived notions bias their memories, there has been little research on the brain mechanisms behind memory bias or whether it becomes more common with age.

7. Persistence

Most people worry about forgetting things. But in some cases people are tormented by memories they wish they could forget, but can’t. The persistence of memories of traumatic events, negative feelings, and ongoing fears is another form of memory problem. Some of these memories accurately reflect horrifying events, while others may be negative distortions of reality. People suffering from depression are particularly prone to having persistent, disturbing memories. So are people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD can result from many different forms of traumatic exposure – for example, sexual abuse or wartime experiences. Flashbacks, which are persistent, intrusive memories of the traumatic event, are a core feature of PTSD.

The extreme pathological memory types have frequent and pervasive memory lapses as found in Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. An inability not only to recall but also to distort memories is often part of these diagnostic conditions. The “I” becomes weakened to the point that forgetfulness predominates over memory. Another more pernicious memory distortion occurs in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this case the forgetfulness is not possible as the “I” is haunted by persistent and intrusive traumatic memories. In these cases the “I” has become identified with the memory.

Personality Distortions

Throughout the years of the American Psychiatric Association’s publications of the four editions of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual there have been 12 Personality Disorders identified. The official psychiatric manual, DSM – IV TR, defines a personality disorder as an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that differs markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment. Personality disorders are a long-standing and maladaptive pattern of perceiving and responding to other people and to stressful circumstances. Personality disorder tendencies may change and vary according to specific environmental and interrelationship circumstances. Within the framework of Psychosophy, personality disorders are aspects of the undeveloped Self, and must be evaluated and treated in that larger context of self-development.

Self-Development Distortions

Arrested development, which gives rise to a variety of personality disorders, can become so severe as to push the soul into infantile states of consciousness. In these states of consciousness one remains dependent on others to care for one’s self. Two of the common features of this condition are Mental Retardation and Severe Mental Illness. The latter can also include states of suicidal ideation, wherein the desire is expressed to negate any further development. Another type of distortion pivots around a Megalomania, wherein the self is deluded into assuming it has reached perfection. In transpersonal psychology, Walsh and Vaughn termed a hybrid of this condition as a Spiritual-By-Pass. This refers to the individual who finds a path of spiritual development and then assumes he or she has no need to do the kind of psychological inner work that every human being must do in order to be healthy in all matters of soul life.

This brief survey has examined the great pillars of 20th-century psychology, and compared them to Rudolf Steiner’s works. I have also explicated Steiner’s view of the healthy development of the human being, recapitulated with every perception that becomes a sensation, then a visualization, etc. Finally, I have briefly looked at incomplete development in these seven soul processes in terms of psychopathology as labeled in modern psychology. An approach to human development, arrested development, and therapy is aided tremendously by viewing through an anthroposophic psychology, or Psychosophy.