Theory And Practice In Transpersonal Psychology

Transpersonal psychology studies both the personal and what is beyond. It can be understood as melding of the wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions with the learning of modern psychology. It has been influenced by the economy, politics, culture, and life style of western (especially American) society since 1960s. It is a reflection about the state of existence and spiritual needs of modern people. It inherits a lot of ancient cultural traditions, especially the eastern religion and philosophy, and absorbs a lot from modern physics, to resist reductionism which has long dominated the psychological academic world. The origin of transpersonal psychology in modern psychology can be traced back to William James and Carl Gustav Jung. Abraham Maslow's late thoughts established a theoretical foundation for transpersonal psychology. Roberto Assagioli's psychosynthesis is the first complete model in transpersonal psychotherapy. Ken Wilber provides a comprehensive framework to integrate the world's spiritual traditions and modern psychology. Besides, modern approaches to transpersonal psychotherapy include: Stanislav Grof's holotropic model, Michael Washburn's neo-Jungian theory, Hameed Ali's diamond approach, transpersonal psychoanalysis, transpersonal existentialism, and body-centered transpersonal approaches. They express different cognizance about the self and what is beyond, and how to reach the ultimate spiritual reality. The states of consciousness aroused by psychedelic and meditation are two foci in transpersonal psychology. They have different psychotherapy effects and limitations as well.The major features of transpersonal experiences include wonderment, assuredness, wisdom, unity, universality, and influential power. The underlying principles of transpersonal therapy are: optimistic and hope-centered, holistic orientation, multidimensional, different pathways of spiritual development, and the perspective of spiritual growth. Transpersonal psychology maintains methodological object-centered (not method-centered), multidisciplinary, cross-cultural approaches. It emphasizes that spiritual experience is universal across cultures and history, and human development proceeds from prepersonal level to personal and on to transpersonal one. The coming decade will find the following issues important for research: the states and structures of consciousness, the relationship between the transpersonal movement and the trend of the postmodernism, the relationship between the psychoses and mysticism, etc.Transpersonal psychology is a field for disputes. Evaluation remains a problem. In this paper, contributions of this school are presented as follows. As for the object of psychology,it provides a most comprehensive model of human nature, which expands the realm of psychology; as for the methodology of psychology, it provides an object-centred open model; as the task of psychology, it provides to integrate the wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions with modern psychology; as for the value-orientation of psychology, it breaks through the limitation of scientism; as for the application of psychology, it develops new psychotherapy techniques; and finally, it provides a life style which advocates peace, harmony, transcendence, and divinity to contend against the state of existence which is noisy, blundering and materialistic. The major limitations of transpersonal psychology can be found in the lack of a solid philosophical basis, the lack of cognition to the negative effects of the illusionary experience, the lack of a clear definition of the study object, and in its attempt to go"beyond"ethics to avoid moral judgement.