Ontopsychology has been formalised in Italy over the past 40 years by Prof. Antonio Meneghetti.
Based on discoveries highlighted and defined while ontopsychological research was being conducted as part of investigations into the human psyche, a real and effective therapeutic approach now exists to help foster the fulfillment of the individual. These same developments have also led to the creation of an alternative integrative model for the scientific process, one that has potential applications in various fields of human activity, including education, law and commerce.
As is always the case when someone takes an innovative scientific standpoint, it is impossible to understand how it developed without examining the personal evolution of its founder.
In the immediate postwar period, Antonio Meneghetti, then aged 11 and part of a family of modest origins, was chosen to pursue ecclesiastical studies on account of his precocious intelligence. Up until 1971, his cultural and intellectual development took shape within the Catholic Church, during which time he attained exceptional levels of scholarship in philosophy and theology, a fact confirmed by an academic curriculum that was virtually equal to none.
In the 1960s, while carrying out his pastoral mission, Antonio Meneghetti became increasingly aware in practical terms of problems relating to the human condition (he himself would go on to say that his experiences in the confessional were to prove of fundamental importance to his subsequent studies). As an intellectual, he decided he wanted to explore these issues far more deeply, and he resolved to seek a concrete, rational, verifiable answer to the human problem. What was the starting point?
In the early 20th century, the field of medicine had witnessed the beginnings of modern psychological (or scientific) studies, with the laboratory of Wundt, the discoveries of Freud, Jung and Behaviourism. But none of the heirs of these first researchers had so far produced tangible results on the major questions facing Man, those concerning the deepest sense of his own existence. Nor had anyone succeeded in identifying one single, specific object for study.
This reflex permeated many aspects of social life and behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s: from philosophy in its strict sense (Fromm, Adorno, Marcuse), to art (Picasso, Dalì, Modigliani) to literature (Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir), music and fashion.
In universities, Marxist and Socialist-leaning intellectual circles reflected the deep and widely felt desire for an ideology of renewal, a tendency that would culminate in the 1968 movement that was to involve a great many young people
However, 1954 had seen the posthumous publication of proceedings from a collection of conferences held by Edmund Husserl in Vienna in the years 1935-36. It was a work that profoundly struck and inspired Antonio Meneghetti: Husserl spoke of a radical renewal of philosophy, of the need to make epoché, that is to say to suspend our judgement on real matters, which are inevitably based on and conditioned by social, family, and ideological convictions, and instead to confront Man once again with reality as it is, rather than as it is interpreted in an emotional or rational sense. The theories came later. All this because there was evidence of a human being who was unhappy and anxious. Nevertheless, the crisis of science was not a crisis of its scientificity: it was more likely that the approach taken had been a mistaken one, that there had been a “decline in the philosophical intentionality”. Husserl was not against science; on the contrary, he identified in the emerging field of psychology the epistemic science that should have re-established the very concept of scientificity, restoring it to its real meaning.
The unconscious, discovered by a university colleague and friend of Husserl, Sigmund Freud, remained a fundamental starting point for psychology. It was, however, necessary to go beyond Freud, Adler and Jung, whose research was too strictly focused on illness. The new approach to psychological study, which emerged as an attempt to answer the compelling questions posed by Existentialism, offered a new interpretation of the therapist-client (no longer patient) relationship and held that the unconscious did in fact conceal Man’s best qualities. Man can therefore find the path to real fulfillment in existence. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May rejected the negative existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre, which plumbed the bitter and disconsolate depths of the absurdity of life and the uselessness of any attempt to ponder it.
Even the Catholic Church did not remain indifferent to this widespread sense of crisis (which manifested itself in a very clear sense through the crisis in spiritual vocations), and launched a major process of self-examination, questioning itself as to the relations it intended to pursue with the civilian world. These were the years of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, from 1962 to 1965. The Council brought with it an important stimulus: the opening up of the Church could induce the best intellectual forces to reach out beyond old boundaries and seek an open confrontation. Famous theologians such as Karl Rahner were among the protagonists.
Antonio Meneghetti played an active role in this process: his training within the Church afforded him a wider understanding of the soul in the spiritual sense, compared with other researchers into the psyche, who had an exclusively academic and/or medical background. Nonetheless, Prof. Antonio Meneghetti had felt the need to supplement his extraordinarily rich curriculum with practical experiences and lay studies, which he had pursued at his own expense, dividing his time between commitments linked to his mission and a determination to extend the breadth of his vision. His aim was in fact to compare the various schools of thought with the different currents of contemporary Psychology and Psychiatry, and examine how they responded to the problems raised by Husserl, the Existentialists, and by psychiatrists such as Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger who had ventured into the area of philosophical research. The therapeutic and philosophical probings of Viktor Frankl were among the perspectives that he found most intriguing: He had a personal encounter with the founder of Logotherapy in Vienna; there he made a deeper examination of aspects of the language of the unconscious, and of the individual responsibility of the client.
As revealed in his first philosophical works, Antonio Meneghetti perceived that the problem does not lie with Man himself, but is in some way linked to the aspect of rationality and to how this is applied. In fact, no ideological position, whether it be a trend, a thought or a political vision, can be considered absolute, even though it would like to be thought of as such: it is a rational reflection which, however, is not entirely in keeping with reality. That is to say, it is clear that one can choose a position, but this will always be an arbitrary choice that does not necessarily coincide with the natural reality of things. Man suffers because he oversteps this mark, assuming a mental approach that is too strictly conditioned by the outside world which imposes absolutes that are both limited and limiting. He however is unaware of this and, at a conscious level he is unable to fathom the cause of his discomfort. An understanding of the mathematical theories of Kurt Gödel on the incomplete nature of formal systems, together with Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the field of physics, offered particular intellective advantages to Prof. Meneghetti: mathematics is a well articulated system of rational opinions, and the reality that surrounds us cannot be measured with absolute precision. So rationality reveals its limits. Meneghetti was not content to carry out research by measuring reality through models. He wanted a result that was concrete, raw and empirical.
When the works of the Vatican Council were finished, Antonio Meneghetti completed his studies and became visiting professor at a university reformed to mark the occasion of the Council proceedings: the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.
There, between 1970 and 1973, he taught Foundations of pastoral psychology; Client-centred Therapy by Rogers; Ontopsychology of Man. One of his students observed that what he was teaching had already gone beyond Rogers; Meneghetti was in fact already formulating an original concept.
If Man is capable of fulfillment, it must be possibile to identify the cause of the disorder. At the clinical level, schizophrenia, an illness with unclear, blurred boundaries (even now, if one examines it from outside the perspectives of Ontopsycology), attracted him.
In the early 1960s, Prof. Meneghetti decided he wanted to be completely independent of any institutions and academies so as to be able to pursue his own work with total autonomy. Once again, at his own expense, he threw himself wholeheartedly into research.
He founded the first Centre for Ontopsychological Therapy in Rome, where he treated people suffering from often extremely serious mental disorders who were unable to find help in public sector establishments. He successfully tested a cure. He perfected the Residence’s therapeutic approach.
Between 1973 and 1978, in a series of conventions that he himself funded, Prof. Meneghetti explained his discoveries, the result of therapy sessions that frequently lasted 10-12 hours a day.
The most important discovery -- ontic In-itself -- allows emerging psychic activity to be perceived before its effects are established, and with it the criteria for the evaluation and functionality of a single individual. Given that this is an internal and strictly individual principle, it is not linked to the outside world, but places it in relativism and pursues its own interests by making use of it. This is the criterion that the school of Rogers had so hoped to identify but had failed to do so.
With this discovery, Prof. Meneghetti was able to conclude the early inquiries of Gödel and Heisenberg and reply to Husserl: “Reality proceeds through formal open projects. Once you have grasped the project and its own interactions, you can measure, check and predict the result”.
Beyond this, the effect of the three combined discoveries (Semantic field, ontic In-itself, deflection monitor) was not to overturn or eliminate science, research etc. but on the contrary, to provide them with an even more solid, real and tangibile foundation: evidence, the only reality that has no need for further demonstration. To practise authentic science, which really serves Man in the concrete aspect of his existence, you need authentic researchers, scientists and scholars. Antonio Meneghetti realised that what he had discovered, and had subsequently seen confirmed by results, was the basis founded on facts upon which science could then be constructed – that very basis of incontrovertible data that Husserl had been seeking.
In 1978, Prof. Meneghetti founded the I.O.A, an NGO which, at the end of the 1990s, went to obtain the special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The International Ontopsychology Association seeks to promote cultural diffusion of the science of ontopsychology which, based on the three discoveries, provides the epistemic foundation for knowledge. The study and evolution of one’s own existence is restored to the individual person through the ontopsychological method.
Ontopsychology does not use models, but instead relies on the effective, measurable monitoring of reality. If properly applied, the method produces a certain result.
Antonio Meneghetti tested the veracity of his discoveries on himself. As well as psychotherapy, he was also active in teaching, cultural diffusion and in entrepreneurial undertakings in the field of art, fashion and music – he is in fact an excellent pianist. He has received various prizes and honours for his achievements in all these different sectors.
In all its cultural and practical activites, the school of ontopsychology has always paid special care and attention to the needs of young people who, in the post-68 generations, have had, and continue to have a difficult and disillusioned relationship with the world that surrounds them.
Man is capable of attaining and maintaining his own historic authenticity by conducting a lifestyle that is in keeping with his real nature. Even a young person can play a leading role in managing his own existence, both for his own self and in his relationships with others.
Ontopsychology has been tried and tested throughout the world and has confirmed its results on psychologies that vary widely due to different cultures and traditions, demonstrating that all human beings have a similar internal nature.
Drawing on research and scientific successes, backed up by tests and confirmed results, Antonio Meneghetti identified and defined the process and phenomenology of intuition, the information that holds the key to finding solutions in the various fields where it is applied, especially in the sectors of economics and successful business management.

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