Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
What is transpersonal psychology
Transpersonal psychology is one of the schools of modern psychology; it began to take shape as an independent field of research in the late 1960s in the USA. Its founders were the widely known psychologists and thinkers A. Maslow, S. Grof, A. Watts, A. Sutich, M. Murphy, S. Krippner and others. Transpersonal psychology has deep roots in the history of culture and religion, in the world’s spiritual practices, which are given a scientific grounding in classical and modern psychology. The leaders of today’s transpersonal psychology are S. Grof, K. Wilber, C. Tart, A. Mindell, S. Krippner and others, each of whom develops their own line of research, methods and school.
Transpersonal psychology studies consciousness across the wide range of its manifestations: the multiplicity of states of consciousness, spiritual crisis, near-death experiences, the development of intuition and creativity, higher states of consciousness, personal resources and parapsychological phenomena. It rests on a holistic view of the human being in the perspective of their spiritual growth, on classical and non-classical philosophical anthropology, on the world’s spiritual traditions and on various ways of self-knowledge and inner work, such as meditation, holotropic breathing, body-oriented practices, art practices, dream work, active imagination, self-hypnosis and so on.
The practical value of transpersonal psychology lies in the fact that it offers a new view of mental health and pathology, providing an integrative, many-sided approach to the person. Transpersonal (beyond-the-personal) experiences have especially powerful healing potential and are of great importance for creativity and for aesthetic and ethical development. The transpersonal approach becomes particularly relevant in the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction as forms of spiritual crisis, in work with neuroses and psychoses, and in the psychological healing of society.
