The theory of the vast possibilities of altered states of mind emerged in the late 1960s in the U.S., spun off from humanistic psychology. In that era it was very popular to master the eastern spiritual practices, the study of psychotropic substances and other forms of influence on the mind.
The greatest influence on transpersonal psychology was the ideas of Swiss and American psychologists Carl Gustav Jung and William James, as well as the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank.
The transpersonalists borrowed the idea of the archetypes of the collective unconscious from Jung. In addition, Carl Gustav himself was interested in the paranormal and religious experience, and believed that spiritual experiences could not be reduced to a rational explanation.
Another forerunner of transpersonal psychology, the aforementioned William James, wrote the book The Variety of Religious Experience, which saw the light of day in 1902. In it the author gave numerous examples of atypical spiritual experiences – mystical visions, personality transformations after conversion, practices of asceticism and self-abasement – and called for research into their impact on the individual. It was James who coined the term “transpersonal.
Otto Rank, who, like Jung, was a disciple of Sigmund Freud, was the first to propose the idea that at birth a person receives the first psychic trauma of his life.
The founders of transpersonal psychology are considered to be Abraham Maslow and Andrew Seutich. They were joined by a number of other psychologists who later began to develop the new direction: Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Miles Wich and Sonia Margulies.
Maslow became the originator of the doctrine of personal self-actualization – the desire to understand one’s abilities and reach their limits. To this end, the psychologist studied peak states of the psyche such as orgasm, sudden insights, ecstasy, expansion of consciousness. Maslow considered humanistic psychology as a transitional stage on the way to transpersonal, transhumanistic, that is, expanding the boundaries of the possible.
Another important milestone for the development of the transpersonal trend is the development of a model of levels of cognition by Ken Wilber, the creator of integral psychology. According to Wilber, the human mind exists on three levels: pre-personal (unconscious), personal and suprapersonal (transpersonal). According to this model, without dealing with one’s unconscious, one cannot reach the personal level, and without working through this stage, in turn, one cannot reach the transpersonal.
The most famous figure in transpersonal psychology is considered to be the Czech-American Stanislav Grof. He put forward the hypothesis that neuroses, psychoses and most other mental disorders are only personality and spiritual crises. The fact that a person cannot cope with them independently, according to Grof, does not make them illnesses.
Already in the 1980s some researchers were calling transpersonal psychology a marginal discipline. However, in 1996 the British Psychological Society opened a branch of transpersonal psychology, which was a sign of its limited academic recognition.
Today there are many different approaches in the field, such as psychosynthesis, transpersonal therapy, self-analysis and others. At the moment, however, transpersonal psychology is not recognized by much of the academic community.
