Focusing on psychosynthesis as transpersonal psychology, Jean Hardy describes how the ideas behind psychosynthesis spring both from scientific study of the unconscious and from the long mystical tradition of both the Easter and Western world. She shows how the roots of a modern spiritual, or transpersonal, psychology lie in a split tradition within the Western world – while psychology aspires to be scientific, religion or mystical knowledge is currently studied within the discipline of theology. The two have up till now been very little related, and the special achievement of psychosynthesis as a therapy is that it relates the soul and theology to the personality and psychology, and perceives personal and developmental patterns as a microcosm of larger social and historical patterns.