Trajectory of the Mind - Transpersonal Psychology in Context PDF

Preview

Summary

Trajectory  of  the  Mind  –  Transpersonal   Psychology  in  Context   NIGEL D’SA This paper charts the development of transpersonal psychology as it grew out of and in relation to the main branches of psychology. It contextualizes the need for a psychology that addressed aspects of lived experienc...

Description

Accelerat ing t he world's research.

Trajectory of the Mind Transpersonal Psychology in Context Nigel S D'Sa

Related papers

Download a PDF Pack of t he best relat ed papers 

OFS 25 Psychedelic Induced Transpersonal Experiences, T herapies, and T heir Implicat ions f… michael winkelman Psychedelic Induced Transpersonal Experiences, T herapies, and T heir Implicat ions for Transpersonal… T homas Robert s Journal of Transpersonal Research, Vol 6 (2). Special Issue: Holot ropic Breat hwork and Ot her Hyperve… Iker Puent e, Julio Salas, Felipe Landaet a Farizo, Felipe Andres Landaet a Farizo, james eyerman, Lenny …

Trajectory of the Mind – Transpersonal  Psychology in Context  NIGEL D’SA

This paper charts the development of transpersonal psychology as it grew out of and in relation to the main branches of psychology. It contextualizes the need for a psychology that addressed aspects of lived experience often neglected by the materialist scientific paradigm yet coming to the fore in the countercultures of the 1960s. An overview of the historical precursors provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the transpersonal school. After defining and placing the transpersonal school within the postmodern turn against mono-logical orders, we consider the theories of Stanislav Grof and his LSD-therapy work with terminally ill patients. The significance of transpersonal psychology as a truly integrative system of thought is discussed. It brings mythology, anthropology, psychology and the sciences together in order to rediscover the universe as a multidimensional experience that unfolds as we unfold. We conclude with the missing dimension in the transpersonal: social engagement.

As we have already glimpsed and will continue to discover, we are able to expand our awareness beyond the perceived limitations of our own person and access the dimensions of a transpersonal consciousness. As we open ourselves to the realization of the in-formed universe, this shift in our collective awareness heralds a resolution of the schisms that have divided us for so long—both among and within us. (Laszlo/Currivan, 2008, CosMos. p. 101)

The school of transpersonal psychology was founded in the late 1960s and is sometimes referred to as the ‘fourth force’ in psychology. We can best understand its emergence in the context of the three preceding forces. Until the 1950s psychology was dominated by the first and second force, behaviorism and psychoanalysis respectively. Behaviorism, led largely by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), John B. Watson (1878-1958), and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), focused on behavior modification through operant and

classical conditioning. Psychoanalysis, driven largely by the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), viewed the pathological subject as driven and distorted by unconscious forces and childhood traumas. Both schools had a mechanistic and determinist approach to the human psyche, complementing the industrial and ‘assembly-line’ era it grew up in. These schools had a huge influence on the field of American advertising and public relations, pioneered by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (1881-1995). This rigid and reductionist model of human beings led to increasing dissatisfaction within psychology and society. In Europe, a number of Freud’s disciples had developed their own models of the psyche and broken away from the school of Freudian analysis. These included Alfred Adler (1870-1937) with his ‘individual psychology’, Otto Rank (1884-1939) with his emphasis on experience and ‘will therapy,’ Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) with his emphasis on the body and orgasmic potency, and Carl Jung (1875-1961) with his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. In America, powerfully influenced by these four breakaway psychologists, a third force emerged in the early 1950s called humanistic psychology. It offered a critique of the limitations of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, and emphasized human qualities such as self-determination, spontaneity, empathy, love, and actualization of potentials. It was spearheaded by two of the most well known American psychologists, Carl Rogers (1902-1987), and Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Rogers radically reworked the therapist-patient relationship, developing a ‘client-centered’ approach that was non-directive and empathetic. Maslow developed his famous hierarchy of needs and replaced the behaviorist model of stimulus-response / reward-punishment with an emphasis on the human capacity for self-directed change. He

also criticized the Freudian school’s tendency to explain everything in terms of sexual instinct and parent-child complexes drawn from a model of the psyche informed chiefly by studies of the mentally ill. Maslow focused instead on the healthy and the outstanding among the population, developing a model of growth where as one masters physiological and social needs, the higher functions of the psyche open up, leading to greater fulfillment and self-actualization. Humanistic psychotherapy became very popular with its focus on the whole person and its multidimensional perspective on human drives and capacities. It was also expressive of the larger social revolutions across American society in the 1960s with the counter-culture movement, civil rights, sexual liberation, anti-establishment and antiwar mobilization on college campuses, an iconoclastic pop culture, and a growing interest in enhanced states of consciousness through Eastern spiritual systems and psychedelic drug use. It was in the late 60s within this prevailing zeitgeist that Maslow began to feel his conceptualization was lacking an important component. Self-actualization had stood at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs but in the last three years of his life he determined there to be a higher motivational level – namely, self-transcendence. In 1967, Maslow and a small working group of psychologists, including Anthony Sutich (19071976) and Stanislav Grof (b.1931) met in Menlo Park, California, “with the purpose,” as Grof recounts: of creating a new psychology that would honor the entire spectrum of human experience, including various non-ordinary states of consciousness. During these discussions, Maslow and Sutich accepted Grof’s suggestion and named the new discipline “transpersonal psychology.” (Grof, 2008, p3)

The group soon launched the Association of Transpersonal Psychology and started the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. In 1975, Robert Frager founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now called Sophia University) in Palo Alto, California.

Transpersonal psychology, although only beginning as a movement in the late 1960s, has had forerunners in the work of American psychologist and educator William James (1842-1910) and Carl Jung, both of whom devoted considerable time to the question of spirituality and transcendence. James discussed transcendental aspects of human experience in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, asserting that our systems of knowledge will never be complete without the inclusion of non-ordinary states of consciousness: Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question...At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality. (James, 1902/1958, p298)

With the advent of the industrial age, the dominant scientific paradigm has been an ethnocentric Western conception wherein monistic materialism accounts for everything, and life, consciousness and intelligence are essentially the side effects of developing matter. This scientific attitude has also been apparent in psychology, where a concerted exclusion of consideration of non-ordinary states of consciousness has largely been the norm, most obviously in Behaviorism and its related schools, but also in Psychoanalysis. The well-publicized falling out between Freud and Jung was partly precipitated by the latter’s interest in spirituality, precognition, and the paranormal in general. Canadian director David Cronenberg includes the infamous “bookcase detonation” incident between Freud and Jung in his film A Dangerous Method (2011). Jung is considered the greatest pioneer and contributor to what eventually became transpersonal psychology. His theory of individuation with its emphasis on integration and wholeness,

investigations into Eastern spiritual systems, world mythologies, alchemy, mysticism, and his conception of an archetypal collective unconscious, was all foundational material for transpersonal psychologists. This is not to say there were no explorations of transpersonal experience in Europe before Jung. There is indeed a long and varied history of a Western esoteric traditions running parallel to the dominant ideology of each era. In European antiquity, the most well-known example is the Eleusinian Mysteries, a Greek mystery cult practiced for almost 2000 years, (1500BC – 400AD). Athenian and Roman elites such as Socrates, Plato, Pindar, Cicero and Epictetus attended and swore oaths to keep the mysteries secret. The content of the mysteries may have related to both the origins of life and the after-life, as Cicero casually suggests in On the Laws: “…as the rites are called "initiations," so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.” (Cicero, Laws II, xiv, 36). Mystery schools discreetly continued in the Christian era with both Christian Gnosticism and the development of Kabala in medieval Spain. The Enlightenment saw an occult revival with both Speculative Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and with such mystical figures as Emmanuel Swedenborg and the Count of St. Germain. The nineteenth century saw a radical syncretism of secret traditions and Eastern religions largely through the work of Helena Blavatsky and the founding of the Theosophical Society. Writers and poets such as Eliphas Levi, WB Yeats, MacGregor Mathers, Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Aleister Crowley and George Gurjieff formed their own mystical societies, exploring and documenting non-ordinary states, paranormal phenomena, mediumship, occult cosmologies, and the pursuit of spiritual ends. The advent of

transpersonal psychology is highly significant in that it does not wear an occult cloak, and attempts to synthesize various knowledge schools with experimentation and lived experience, openly and yet within the professional strictures of procedural protocols and peer review. Transpersonal psychology concerns itself with both higher order development – beyond the self-actualization needs of the ego – and the addressing of human experiences that have been traditionally neglected or marginalized by the main branches of psychology. A general definition by Lajoie and Shapiro (1992) based on an extensive survey of 40 definitions published during the first 23 years of transpersonal psychology, posited that it "is concerned with the study of humanity's highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness." (Lajoie & Shapiro, 1992, p43) Additionally, Walsh and Vaughan (1993) argue that transpersonal psychology is not limited to the study of states of consciousness but may include phenomena with strong behavioral components such as prayer, compassionate action, altruism, love, and spiritual healing. They also make the important point that, in practice, much of the concern in transpersonal therapy is not with the ‘highest’ or ‘peak experiences,’ but often with ‘trough’ experiences or existential crises, what Grof calls “spiritual emergencies,” or the dark night of the soul. (Walsh & Vaughan, 1993, pp125-182). Grof, in his 2008 article, A Brief History of Transpersonal Psychology, further elaborates on what transpersonal psychology is and is not, seeing its genesis as an effort at correcting “the ethnocentric and cognicentric bias of mainstream psychiatry and psychology.” (Grof, 2008, p6) For Grof, the dominant materialistic sciences, originating

in the West, have sidelined, denigrated, and pathologized various ‘non-ordinary states of consciousness.’ This term is preferred by transpersonal psychologists who study these states and recognize their value, whereas Grof points out that: Mainstream psychiatrists prefer the term altered states, which reflects their belief that only the everyday state of consciousness is normal and that all departures from it without exception represent pathological distortions of the correct perception of reality and have no positive potential. (Groff, 2008, p5) As an example, Grof mentions famous psychoanalyst Franz Alexander, who in 1931 published an article in which Buddhist meditation is described in pathological terms as a state of “artificial catatonia.” (ibid, p4). For Grof, ‘non-ordinary states of consciousness’ is a term too broad for the purposes of transpersonal therapy. More specifically, Grof asserts: “Transpersonal psychology is interested in a significant subgroup of these states that have heuristic, healing, transformative and even evolutionary potential.” (ibid, p5). To this subgroup he gave the name “holotropic” states, a term he coined to signify, based on its literal etymological construction, “oriented towards wholeness” or “moving in the direction of wholeness.” (ibid, p6). Grof has focused on the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to induce holotropic states. He has also developed a method of breathing called ‘Holotropic Breathwork’ that similarly induces holotropic states. John E. Mack (1929-2004), professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Pulitzer Price winning author, also worked in transpersonal terrain, and has published two groundbreaking studies of the alien encounter phenomenon and their transformative effects on individuals who experience them. His view on the transpersonal and on nonordinary states further elucidates the growth of the field as an important school of

psychology. Writing the forward to Paths Beyond the Ego: The Transpersonal Vision (1993), he elaborates: In the transpersonal universe or universes, we seek to know our worlds close up, relying on feeling and contemplation, as well as observation and reason, to gain information about a range of possible realities. In this universe we take subjectivity for granted and depend on direct experience, intuition, and imagination for discoveries about the inner and outer worlds. A transpersonal epistemology appreciates the necessity of ordinary states of consciousness for mapping the terrain of the physical universe, but nonordinary states are seen as powerful means of extending our knowledge beyond the four dimensions of the Newtonian/Einsteinian universe. (Mack, 1993, p. xii)

This important distinction makes clear that transpersonal psychology does not supplant, discard or compete with the traditional schools of psychology but facilitates an extension of understanding beyond their self-prescribed limits and capacities. In this approach, transpersonal psychology can be considered part of the postmodern turn, in that it values openness, ambiguity, multiple ways of knowing, and moving beyond empirical science to listen to diverse, often excluded voices. A brief overview of the postmodern turn in psychology will be helpful in situating transpersonal psychology. The postmodern era and its viewpoint de-centers the individual, re-contextualizing subjectivity as a network of relations. In the Concise encyclopedia of psychology, postmodernism is described as recognizing that the heterogeneous and noncommensurable contexts of the practical world involves a loss of hegemony for formalized experimental and statistical methods research. There is an acceptance of diverse ways of producing knowledge, with a move from knowledge as abstract, objective, and universal to ecologically valid, socially useful, and local. (Kvale, S, 1998, p669)

Transpersonal psychology emphasizes experience over theory and does not rely on authoritarian models to legitimate knowledge, finding legitimacy instead in meaningful affects and the positive changes the client undergoes. Postmodern therapies acknowledge and embrace the complexity of reality and make use of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to avoid oversimplification.

A number of psychotherapies fall within a postmodern approach. Constructivism looks at the way clients frame their problems and takes the position that we are not merely the victims of our predicaments, but active agents in how we construct our views of them and how we order our experiences. In alignment with a postmodern emphasis on the linguistic and social construction of reality, Constructivism helps us acknowledge that we “exist in living webs of relationships, many of which are mediated by language and symbol systems.” As such “a constructive view of human experience is one that emphasizes meaningful action by a developing self in relationship.” (Mahoney, 2003, p5). Narrative therapy evolved out of Constructivism and takes the stand that people view themselves in the light of the life stories they constructed about themselves. Narrative therapists, in a collaborative relationship with the client, help to deconstruct, revise and modify these stories in an effort to dominate and gain control over them. (Seligman, 2001). In a similar way, transpersonal therapy can allow clients to recontextualize their predicaments, as for example, in Grof’s LSD therapy with terminally ill cancer patients. Here the client re-contextualizes not through linguistic and narrative deconstruction, but through direct experience in non-ordinary states. The client’s assumptions about reality, death, and ego may undergo rapid transformation through the holotropic experience, incorporating awareness of a deeper reality. Where transpersonal therapy significantly differs from both postmodern therapies and previous psychotherapy schools is in eschewing dependence on language and verbal techniques. Transpersonal therapy emphasizes experiential processes over language-driven therapy, and employs what Grof calls ‘technologies of the sacred,’ such as psychedelic drugs, meditation, visualization, breath-control, yoga, relaxation techniques, music, rhythm and ritual.

Transpersonal psychology includes under its umbrella East-West psychology, and employs a range of Eastern knowledge systems and therapies drawn from the Buddhist and Hindu approaches of India, the Taoist and neo-Confucian approaches of China, and the Zen Buddhist approach of Japan. The basic premise behind these approaches, as Roger Walsh outlines in his article Asian Psychotherapies, is that: our ordinary state of mind is considerably more dysfunctional, uncontrolled and underdeveloped than we usually recognize. This results in an enormous amount of unnecessary personal, interpersonal and social suffering. …it is possible to train and develop the mind beyond conventionally recognized limits and thereby overcome the usual dysfunction and lack of control. This can enhance happiness, wellbeing, and psychological capacities to remarkable degrees. (Walsh, 2010, p3)

Walsh, citing Ken Wilber, points out that objections to Asian therapies often stem from a “pre-trans” fallacy, wherein “most Western therapies recognized only the first two developmental stages of prepersonal and personal and were largely unaware of the transpersonal.” (ibid, p4) This has resulted in transpersonal experiences being misdiagnosed or dismissed as infantile or pathological throwbacks to the prepersonal stage. Development beyond the personal stage of a healthy ego was not a serious consideration. As Charles Tart points out in Som...