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

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.

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". 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.