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Jean Hardy's purpose in writing this book is to establish the credibility of psychosynthesis and its originator Roberto Assagioli. He, like Freud and Jung, was a psychiatrist who considered himself a scientist and pragmatist. Also, like Jung, he was essentially a mystic and healer concerned with the struggles of the soul, the self or the spiritual aspect of the individual.
The book opens with a description of the history, and an explanation of the concepts of psychosynthesis which have an idealised grandiose quality expressed in terms like the Higher Self, for the Soul, transcendent self-actualizer, and the notion of people as basically without evil. The importance of symbols as the language of the unconscious is mentioned, and the process of integration of unconscious content through synthesis is described. This is similar to the notion of the transcendent function in analytical psychology. Indeed there are many similarities to Jung's psychology in Hardy's description of psychosynthesis. Another example is the stimulations of imaginative processes through what Jung terms active imagination. Psychosynthesis apparently uses more active techniques to exercise imagination and borrows freely from many other disciplines, for instance guided fantasy from Gestalt psychology. This leads to the criticism of psychosynthesis as being an “eclectic