One of the psychosynthesis models which has informed my self-inquiry is the Star. In it, Assagioli captures six psychological functions through which we as human beings form our knowing: sensation, feeling, thought, intuition, imagination and impulse.
We develop these functions differently, depending on how much we practice them and trust them. They all play a part in how we form experiences and interpret the world around us.
- Sensation is about information that we pick up through our five senses, and how that information reverbates through our own physical body.
- Emotion is about what we feel in the moment. There are many names for our different emotions. The four most commonly listed emotions are anger, fear, sadness and joy.
- Impulse is an urge that often feels like it comes more from or through the body, often connecting us to a felt need and demanding to be expressed. It could be for example hunger, sleepiness, a sexual desire, or a reactive defence mechanism.
- Imagination includes inner images of past, present and future, both of lived and fictive events. Dreams and daydreams are part of this function.
- Thought includes logic, judgments, opinions, analysis, argument, assumptions, conclusions, reasoning etc. Our thoughts are all mediated through language, which constitutes a often unconscious context in which our thinking takes place.
- Intuition is a felt sense of direct and unmediated clarity, often connecting several inner experiences that may be more or less conscious in the moment. It can tell us something about how to act in a situation without giving us a transparent sense of where the insight is coming from. Some will say it is a merger of experience, present awareness, emotion and thought.
These psychological functions operate in our encounters with the world around us, but they can also impact and thereby reinforce each other. Remember, for example, the Madeleine cake that Marcel Proust tasted at the beginning of his epos ”A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” The sensation of its taste and aroma transported him in a flash to a long forgotten memory of a garden he had known as a boy. And this inner connection became the portal to the universe which Proust’s recreated in his life accomplishment.
According to psychosynthesis, we all have access to all six psychological functions. Yet each of us trusts these functions differently. This impacts how frequently we use them and how conscious we are about how they impact our world view and our actions.
Here is a way I have made use of the Star model to sharpen my self-inquiry:
- Which function do you know the best/least in yourself?
- Which function do you trust the most/least?
- Which one would you be most interested in getting to know better? And what could be an experiement to help you do that?
Anna Thurdin Hedblad, founder Paxsum AB