Illuminates the role of empathetic love in psychotherapy.

Argues that a primal wounding of the human spirit occurs in earliest human lift that disrupts fundamental relationships and leads to anxiety, loneliness, and alienation; and shows how this wounding can be redeemed through therapy and through living one's life differently.

The primal wound is the result of a violation we all suffer in various ways, beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life. Because we are treated not as individual, unique human beings but as objects, our intrinsic, authentic sense of self is annihilated. This primal wounding breaks the fundamental relationships that form the fabric of human existence: the relationship to oneself, to other people, to the natural world, and to a sense of transpersonal meaning symbolized in concepts such as the Divine, the Ground of Being, and Ultimate Reality. In this book, Firman and Gila apply object relations theory, self-psychology, transpersonal psychology, and psychosynthesis to the issues of psychological wounding, healing, and growth and show how this wounding can be redeemed through therapy and through changing one's way of living.

"Firman and Gila integrate important material from diverse schools of psychology and then expand it with their personal touch. The Primal Wound presents a scholarly -- yet understandable to the educated lay person -- description of some of the important dynamics of psychological wounding from a broad perspective, while also going deep into the soul and even exploring our relationship to God. There is little available on this topic and in the area of trauma psychology". -- Charles Whitfield, M.D., author of Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Wounds of Trauma

Conceived by Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, psychosynthesis is one of the first Western psychologies that addresses both spiritual development and psychological healing and growth by recognizing and supporting the particular life journey of the person -- the individual's own unique path of Self-realization. Firman and Gila present a comprehensive account of psychosynthesis, providing a transpersonal integration of developmental, personality, and clinical theory. They reveal some of the relationships between psychosynthesis and contemporary developmental research, object relations theory, intersubjective psychology, trauma theory, the recovery movement, Jungian psychology, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, and common psychological diagnoses.