Transpersonal psychology

Founding in the late 1960s

Stanislav Grof, one of the participants, describes the founding in a 2008 history. In his account, Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich launched the Association for Humanistic Psychology and its journal, and humanistic psychology, which Maslow called the Third Force, became popular. Its founders nevertheless felt it had left out the spiritual dimension of the human psyche. In 1967 a small working group met in Menlo Park, California, with Maslow, Sutich and Grof among its members. Grof states that he suggested the name transpersonal psychology, which replaced the earlier working term transhumanistic. This is an insider account, and other participants may remember the sequence differently.

A university course chapter that lists the board of editors of the first issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969 names Sutich, Grof, Roberto Assagioli, Viktor Frankl, James Fadiman and Huston Smith among them. The same chapter says Sutich had also founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, that Maslow became president of the American Psychological Association in 1969, and that he died in June 1970.

Associations, journals and schools

The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology is dated to 1969 by the course chapter, which gives 1971 as the founding year of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. Other accounts may differ, and the association's own records should settle the date. Grof and colleagues report that the International Transpersonal Association was formed in 1978 to promote education and research in transpersonal subjects, was dissolved in 2004, and was being revived at the time of their 2008 paper.

Sofia University states that it was founded in 1975 as the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology by Robert Frager, who developed the original graduate curriculum around six areas: intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical, social and creative. It remains accredited by WSCUC and has since broadened its programs beyond psychology.

The humanistic institutional line

Saybrook University traces itself to the Humanistic Psychology Institute, established in 1971 at Sonoma State University by Eleanor Criswell, Rollo May, Clark Moustakas and James Bugental. The idea grew from the 1964 Old Saybrook Conference, sponsored by the American Association for Humanistic Psychology, where figures including Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers met. The institute took the Saybrook name in 1981 and became Saybrook University in 2009. This history belongs mainly to humanistic psychology, and the source does not describe it as a transpersonal founding.

The name and how it is defined

The word transpersonal was chosen in 1967 according to Grof, replacing transhumanistic. The field has not settled on one definition. A course chapter reports a thematic analysis by Hartelius, Caplan and Rardin in 2007 of 160 viewpoints and definitions, which found three broad themes: psychology beyond the ego, integrative or holistic psychology, and psychology of transformation. The same chapter reports that an earlier analysis of publications from 1991 to 2001 found going beyond the ego in 66 percent and spirituality in 61 percent.

Friedman separates transpersonal psychology as a scientific field from the broader area of transpersonal studies, which may use scientific or nonscientific methods. He also distinguishes transpersonal phenomena, which he places within the reach of science, from transcendent noumena, which he places outside it.

Third force and fourth force

Humanistic psychology was called the Third Force by Maslow, in contrast to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Grof calls transpersonal psychology the Fourth Force, a description in which the new school grew out of humanistic psychology and added spiritual and non-ordinary dimensions of experience. Maslow is quoted in the course chapter as describing a psychology centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interests, going beyond self-actualization. The framing as a fourth force is the school's own and is not a standard classification in mainstream psychology.

Orientation and key ideas

The course chapter cites the Articles of Association for Transpersonal Psychology, published by Sutich in 1972, as stating four ideas that define a transpersonal orientation. They hold that impulses toward an ultimate state are continuous in every person, that full awareness of these impulses is not always present, that realizing an ultimate state depends on direct practice and suitable conditions, and that every individual has the right to choose a path. These are the association's stated principles and not tested propositions.

Study programs and associated topics

Sofia University describes its Master of Arts in Transpersonal Psychology as a mostly online program with two five-day, retreat-style residencies, combining theory and practice and framed around transpersonal, spiritual, ecological and creative practices, self-awareness and personal transformation. The course chapter lists degree programs at several other US institutions and says programs exist in a number of other countries.

Topics the school discusses overlap with Machipedia pages on Soul, Spiritual Growth and Spiritual Emergency. The chapter's reference list also shows that the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology published studies of meditation from the late 1970s onward. The chapter says the field developed its own research methods for exceptional experiences, but the sources reviewed do not describe those methods in a way that supports any procedure here.

Aims stated by the school

Sofia University defines the field as the scientific study of the full range of human experience, covering both trauma and peak functioning. The course chapter lists the school's stated promise as widening psychology's concept of the self, studying human potentials, and offering an alternative view of human nature. These statements describe what the school sets out to do. They are not findings.

Clinical recognition of spiritual problems

David Lukoff, a psychologist who describes about 25 years of work with the Spiritual Emergence Network, writes that the Religious or Spiritual Problem category (V62.89), added to the DSM-IV in 1994, acknowledged distressing religious and spiritual experiences as nonpathological. He states that he co-authored the category. This is a first-person course introduction and reflects the view of a proponent.

Scholarly self-assessment

Writing from within the field, Friedman argued in 2002 that developing transpersonal psychology as a science is important and answered objections based on romanticism, scientism and constructionism. Cunningham reviewed the main disputes in 2007 and argued that the field could bridge psychological science and the transpersonal psyche. Both abstracts are advocacy within the field, and neither reports a test of its therapeutic claims.

Meditation research the school draws on

Meditation is a practice the school's literature has long engaged with, but trials of meditation programs do not test the school as a whole. A 2014 systematic review in JAMA Internal Medicine by Goyal and colleagues included 47 randomized trials with 3,515 participants, all with active controls. It found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programs improved anxiety, depression and pain, and low evidence for stress or distress and mental health quality of life. It found low or insufficient evidence for positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep and weight, and no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment.

No randomized trial of transpersonal psychology as a complete approach was identified in the sources reviewed. PubMed searches run for this page used the terms transpersonal psychology, spiritual emergency and religious or spiritual problem, and the results were not screened record by record. Findings on mindfulness programs should not be carried over to the school's wider concepts.

Disputes listed within the field

Cunningham's 2007 article lists the main critiques that divide the field: the weakness of its definition, overlap with Wilber's integral psychology, whether it qualifies as a science, whether it is too metaphysical, whether it neglects the problem of evil, and what it contributes to mainstream psychology. Friedman's 2002 paper addresses the science question directly and argues for separating testable transpersonal phenomena from transcendent claims that science cannot reach.

Mainstream psychology's position

The course chapter says mainstream psychology's view of religion and spirituality has not always been positive, while noting that the American Psychological Association has published books on religion in clinical practice. The sources reviewed for this page do not include a critique written by mainstream psychologists outside the field, so the nature and extent of those responses is not documented here.

Spiritual emergency and diagnostic boundaries

Spiritual emergency is the school's term for distress it associates with spiritual experience, and it has its own Machipedia page. Lukoff's account places the 1994 DSM-IV category within the effort to separate such distress from mental illness. The sources reviewed give no data on how often spiritual emergency occurs, how it is reliably told apart from psychosis, or how outcomes compare across approaches, so the concept remains a clinical and conceptual debate rather than a measured finding.

Adverse effects reported with meditation

A 2020 systematic review by Farias and colleagues examined 83 studies with 6,703 participants. Of these studies, 55 reported at least one meditation-related adverse event. Pooled prevalence was 8.3 percent overall, 3.7 percent in experimental studies and 33.2 percent in observational studies. The most common events were anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies, and events could occur in people with no previous mental health problems.

Lindahl and colleagues interviewed Western Buddhist meditators and experts and described 59 meditation-related experiences across seven domains. Their valence ranged from very positive to very negative, and distress and impairment ranged from minimal and transient to severe and enduring. The study is qualitative and does not give prevalence.

Training, licensure and care boundaries

Sofia University lists licensure disclosures for its Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology and its Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology. Its pages for the transpersonal psychology programs do not state that they lead to licensure, and the only credential mentioned is an expressive arts consultant credential tied to one concentration, which the university does not guarantee. No statutory regulation or professional training standard for the title transpersonal psychologist was found in the sources reviewed.

Transpersonal ideas are not a substitute for assessment by a licensed clinician. A person with severe distress, thoughts of self-harm, or symptoms suggestive of psychosis should not delay conventional care.