Transpersonal psychology: Difference between revisions

Transpersonal psychology is a school of psychology that studies the spiritual and transpersonal dimensions of humanity, and the possibilty of development beyond traditional ego-boundaries. The transpersonal dimensions of human psychology are connected to such issues as self-development, peak experiences and mystical experiences. The field is considered by proponents to be the "fourth force"' in the field of psychology, the three other fields being psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanism.

According to its proponents, the traditional schools of psychology — behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanism — have failed to include these "transegoic" elements of human existence, such as religious conversion, altered states of consciousness and spirituality. Thus, transpersonal psychology strives to combine insights from modern psychology with insights from the world's contemplative traditions, both Eastern and Western. The transpersonal and spiritual dimensions of the psyche has traditionally not been a focus of interest for Western psychology, which has mainly focused on the prepersonal and personal aspects of the human psyche (Miller, 1998).

The development of the field

A major motivating factor behind the initiative to establish this school of psychology was Abraham Maslow's already published work regarding human peak experiences. The term "transpersonal" had already been in use for a while but it was Grof who connected the term to a concrete school of psychology, refering to the psychological study of experiences which transcend the traditional boundaries of the ego (i.e. which are 'trans-personal,' or 'transegoic'). Among the thinkers who are considered to have set the stage for transpersonal studies we find such historical names as William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Roberto Assagioli (Miller, 1998).

Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof and Anthony Sutich were the initiators behind the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969, the leading academic journal in the field. This was soon to be followed by the founding of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) in 1972. In the 1970's and the 1980's the field developed through the works of such authors as Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn, Daniel Goleman, Frances Vaughan, James Fadiman, Arthur Hastings, David Lukoff and Stuart Sovatsky. While Wilber has been considered an influential writer and theoretician in the field, he has since personally dissociated himself from the movement in favor of what he calls an integral approach.

Today transpersonal psychology also includes approaches to health, social sciences and practical arts. Transpersonal perspectives are also being applied to such diverse fields as psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, pharmacology and cross-cultural studies (Scotton, Chinen and Battista, 1996). Currently, transpersonal psychology (especially archetypal psychology of Carl Jung and his followers) is integrated, at least to some extent, into many psychology departments in US and European Universities. Transpersonal therapies also are included in many therapeutic practices.

Institutions of higher learning that have adopted insights from transpersonal psychology include California Institute of Integral Studies, Saybrook Institute in California, and Naropa University in Colorado. The transpersonal approach is also a part of such organizations as The British Psychological Society, which maintains a separate section addressing the transpersonal perspective. There is also a strong connection between the transpersonal and the humanistic perspective. This is not surprising since transpersonal psychology started off within humanistic psychology.

One must not confuse transpersonal psychology with parapsychology, a mistake frequently made due to the overlapping and unconventional research interests of both fields. While parapsychology leans more towards traditional scientific epistemology (laboratory experiments, statistics, research on cognitive states) transpersonal psychology is more related to the epistemology of the humanities and the hermeneutic disciplines (humanism, existentialism, phenomenology, anthropology). It is also important not to confuse transpersonal psychology with the New Age. Although the discipline grew out of the human potential movement, which many commentators associate with a broad conception of the New Age, it is still problematic to place it within this context. Transpersonal psychology is an academic discipline, not a religious or spiritual movement, and many of the field's leading authors, among those Sovatsky (1998), have clearly adressed the problematical aspects of New Age hermeneutics.

Research Interests

The transpersonal perspective includes such research interests as: psychology and psychotherapy, meditation, pharmacology, spiritual paths and practices, personal transformation and change, consciousness research, addiction and recovery, psychedelic and altered states of consciousness research, dying and near death experience (NDE), self-realization and higher values, and the mind-body connection (Rowan, 1993; Scotton, Chinen and Battista, 1996).

Although there are many disagreements with regard to transpersonal psychology, one could succinctly lay out a few basic traits of the field:

• transpersonal psychology extends its field of investigation to religious, philosophical, psychological and contemplative concepts expounded in: Buddhism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Sufism, Vedanta, Taoism, Shamanism Christian contemplative traditions, Native American healing and Neoplatonism.

• by common consent, the following branches are considered to be transpersonal psychological schools: Jungian depth psychology (more recently rephrased as archetypal psychology by James Hillman), psychosynthesis founded by Roberto Assagioli, and the theories of Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber and Charles Tart.

Contributions to the academic field

Allthough any model of consciousness can only be understood as an intellectual abstraction of reality, transpersonal psychology has made significant contributions to the field of consciousness studies. While authors like Wilber and Battista tend to emphasize the understanding of consciousness in the form of levels, where each superior level includes and integrates its junior dimensions, theorists like Washburn and Grof tend to emphasize the regressive nature of consciousness. Regressive in the the sense that the individual has to integrate the deeper and prerational aspects of the psyche before it can re-enter the stream of development in a healthy fashion (Scotton, Chinen & Battista, 1996).

Wilber's main contribution to the field is the theory of a spectrum of consciousness consisting of three main developmental arenas: the prepersonal or pre-egoic, the personal or egoic, and the transpersonal or trans-egoic (Miller, 1998). Building upon the work of Wilber, transpersonal psychologists have also made arguments in favor of a possible differentiation between pre-rational psychiatric problems and authentic transpersonal problems. The confusion of these two categories is said to lead to what transpersonal theory calls a "pre/trans fallacy", the mistaking of transpersonal states for pre-rational states (Lukoff et.al, 1998).

Transpersonal Psychology has brought clinical attention to a number of psychoreligious and psychospiritual problems. Psychoreligious problems has to do with possible psychological conflict resulting from a person's involvement with the beliefs and practices of an organized religious institution. Among these problems we find problematic experiences related to change in denomination or conversion, intensification of religious belief or practice, loss of faith, and oining or leaving a new religious movement or cult.

Psychospiritual problems are experiences of a different category than religious problems. These problems has to do with a person's relationship to existential issues and issues that transcend ordinary day-to-day reality. Many of these psychological problems are usually not discussed by mainstream psychology. Among these problems we find psychiatric complications related to Loss of faith, near-death experience, mystical experience, Kundalini opening, shamanistic Initiatory crisis, psychic opening, past lives, possession states, meditation-related problems, and separation from a spiritual teacher. Complications that are considered to present problems of a combined religious and spiritual nature are issues related to serious illness and terminal illness (Lukoff et.al, 1998). A considerable share of meditation problems, for example, might have to do with the fact that the import of Eastern contemplative systems to a Western setting has not always been sensitive to the socio-cultural context from which these systems originated (Turner et.al, 1995; Lukoff et.al, 1998). A detail that might leave Western practitoners with considerable hermeneutic (interpretive or explanatory) challenges.

Because of the nature of psychoreligious and psychospiritual problems, the transpersonal community made a proposal for a new diagnostic category entitled "religious or spiritual problem" at the beginning of the 1990s. This category was later included in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) under the heading "Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention", Code V62.89 (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). According to transpersonal theorists, the inclusion is part of the greater cultural sensitivity of the manual and could help promote enhanced understanding between the fields of psychiatry and religion/spirituality (Turner et.al, 1995; Sovatsky, 1998). The construct validity of the new category has been assessed by Milstein et.al (2000).

Criticisms of transpersonal psychology

Criticisms of transpersonal psychology has come from several commentators, among those Ellis (1989) who has questioned transpersonal psychology's scientific status and its relationship to religion and mysticism. This criticism has been answered by Wilber (1989) and Walsh (1989). Doctrines or ideas of many colorful personalities who were or are spiritual teachers in the Western world are often assimilated in the transpersonal psychology mainstream scene, such as Gurdjieff or Alice Bailey. This development is, generally, seen as detrimental to the aspiration of transpersonal psychologists to gain firm and respectable academic status.

It could also be argued that most psychologists do not hold strictly to traditional schools of psychology — most psychologists take an eclectic approach. This could mean that the transpersonal categories listed are considered by standard subdisciplines of psychology, religious conversion falling within the ambit of social psychology, altered states of consciousness within physiological psychology, and spiritual life within the psychology of religion. Transpersonal psychologists, however, disagree with the approach to such phenomena taken by traditional psychology, and claim that they have typically been dismissed either as signs of various kinds of mental illnesses or regression to infantile stages of psychosomatic development.

References

• American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.
• Ellis, Albert (1989) Dangers of Transpersonal Psychology: A Reply To Ken Wilber. Journal of Counseling & Development, Feb89, Vol. 67 Issue 6, p336, 2p;
• Lukoff, David, Lu, Francis G. & Turner, Robert P. (1998) From Spiritual Emergency to Spiritual Problem - The Transpersonal Roots of the New DSM-IV Category. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 38(2), pp. 21-50
• Milstein, Glen; Midlarsky, Elizabeth; Link, Bruce G.; Raue, Patrick J. & Bruce, Martha (2000) Assessing Problems with Religious Content: A Comparison of Rabbis and Psychologists. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 188(9):608-615, September
• Miller, John J. (1998) Book Review: Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology. Psychiatric Services 49:541-542, April 1998. American Psychiatric Association
• Rowan, John. (1993) The Transpersonal: Psychotherapy and Counselling. London: Routledge
• Scotton, Bruce W, Chinen, Allan B. and John R. Battista, Editors (1996)Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books
• Sovatsky, Stuart (1998)Words from the Soul : Time, East/West Spirituality, and Psychotherapeutic Narrative. New York: State University of New York Press (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)
• Turner, Robert P.; Lukoff, David; Barnhouse, Ruth Tiffany & Lu Francis G. (1995) Religious or spiritual problem. A culturally sensitive diagnostic category in the DSM-IV. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Jul;183(7):435-44.
• Walsh, Roger (1989) Psychological Chauvinism and Nuclear Holocaust: A Response to Albert Ellis and Defense of Non-Rational Emotive Therapies. Journal of Counseling & Development; Feb89, Vol. 67 Issue 6, p338
• Wilber, Ken (1989) Let's Nuke the Transpersonalists: A Response to Albert Ellis. Journal of Counseling & Development, Feb89, Vol. 67 Issue 6, p332

External links

• Association for Transpersonal Psychology
• The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
• Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
• AHP - John Rowan's Guide to Humanistic Psychology - Transpersonal Psychology
• The British Psychological Society -Transpersonal Psychology Section
• Transpersonal Psychology: links
• Explore Transpersonal Psychology
• [1]Victor Losacco,ER
• Transpersonal Training in Australia
• John Davis's Transpersonal Psychology website