Yehuda Tagar formed and articulated a method of psychotherapy and healing which he called Psychophonetics.
The story of its development is interwoven with his biography:
“Poetry was an act of bridging, breathing, broadening for me from the age of 14. The creation of Phylophonetics became an extension of my poetry, a path of encouraging people to name their own reality, to do their poetic deed”.
Psychophonetics is a path of a awakening to the inner life through the outer life and to the outer life through the inner. As such, it is an echo of Rudolf Steiner’s definition of Anthroposophy: “a path of knowing, leading the spiritual within the human being to the spiritual in the world”.
Psychophonetics is one expression of Anthroposophy (see “Anthroposophy” below)
Yehuda writes:
“Three streams of my personal, spiritual and artistic striving lead me to the formation of Psychophonetics.
- My desire to find a practical way of moving towards the fulfilment of the 7 conditions of spiritual development set out by Rudolf Steiner in his seminal work ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its attainment’.
- My practical search for an approach to drama as a part of human awakening.
I encountered this in my late 20s at Emerson College, Sussex, England but the vision was not unfolding within Steiner circles and, as a frustrated by creative young man, I had to undergo my own journey. When I found his course “Speech and Drama” (September 1924), it was clear to me that what he had put forward 60 years before had not yet started and this journey led me to this discovery of Psychophonetics. - I was recovering from a severe personal crisis in my late 20s and, having explored humanistic, existential and transpersonal approaches to human development in my youth, I could not find an established path of psychology, psychotherapy and counselling based on Steiner’s worldview. In Steiner’s lectures on “Psychosophy” (November 1910), as well as in his critical writing about Psychoanalysis, I found a starting point for the development of such a path, the most comprehensive, insightful and practical approach to the exploration of the human soul that I had come across by then.
My explorations took place while I explored Steiner’s approach to the development of the actor. Drama became, for me, the laboratory for a practical exploration of Psychosophy, which formed the conceptual framework and the language for my research. The attempt to integrate my soul life as an expression of my spiritual being, he enthused my research, constantly grounding it and giving it a human reality.
These three streams converged into the formation of Psychophonetics as a path of exploring human experience, self-knowledge and creativity towards transformation, healing and growth”.