Transpersonal psychology

As the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow became a "third force" after behaviorism and psychoanalysis, transpersonal psychology evolved as a "fourth force", extending humanistic psychology, at the least, with the spiritual dimension. Maslow and his colleague Anthony Sutich agreed with this formulation. Michael Harner added that it was "ethnocentric and cognicentric".

Stanislaus Grof rephrased Harner's extension as "pragmacentric".

Visions and nonordinary reality

Obviously, a wide range of societies have traditions in which ritual produces trance, ecstatic, or other states of nonordinary reality. Transpersonal psychology works on creating contexts in which these fit.

Grof wrote that the Freudian model is inadequate to deal with

the dynamics of emotional and psychosomatic healing, personality transformation and consciousnesss evolution that come with certain powerful techniques, inclusinf psychedelic therapy, healing trance dance, or certain experiential techniques in modern psychotherapy. Such techniques activate and motivate deep unconscious and superconscious levels of the human psyche and require a greatly expanded conceptual framework. An individual that uses them for self-exploration or as a therapist has to have a model or cartography of the psyche that includes transbiographical domains.

His cartography includes one traditional psychotherapeutic domain, and two new ones:

• Biographical-recollective
• Perinatal domain, including near-birth and near-death experiences
• Transpersonal domain

The latter domains are, he says, accessible to most people, but with psychedelics or trance-inducing experiences, or in dreams.

Religious experience

Goodchild mentions the Sufi idea of "visionary states were thought to be 'really real'; these landscapes were called the mundus imaginalis, and were clearly distinguished from fantasy, meaning unreal, states." In a psychiatric context, Mack wrote of "Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness".

Animal symbolism

Grof describes profound experiences with animals representing archetypes, which most commonly are events in the "inner world" but may be triggered by encounters with actual animals. In the Freudian model, these are symbolic, such as dreams of a predator representing aggression.

Animal identification, however, is considered uniquely transperonal. He quotes a typical statement of "No, you do not understand; there is nothing to analyze here, I really was an elephant. I know what an elephant feels like when he is angry or sexually aroused, and what it is like when water enters his trunk. An elephant does not stand for anything; an elepant is an elephant." This is different from an animal as spirit guide.

Alien encounters

In an article at the John Mack Institute, Virginia Goodchild wrote

It is possible, therefore, that the encounter experience is a contemporary form of an ancient mystical knowledge or gnosis, that is, knowledge that comes from the reality of visionary or revelatory states, that are also taking place in an actual "space" of the soul, or subtle vehicle. Such experiences also make it imperative that we expand our dichotomous worldview to include once again these other levels of reality, that in fact are by no means new, but recover an ancient multidimensionality.