11 Oct Transpersonal Psychology: Future
The next wave of transpersonalism can be inferred from the surprising mainstreaming of psychedelics. Although our field has been exploring the therapeutic and ecstatic use of psychedelic substances and the altered states they provide for decades, no one paid us any attention. Now that the subject has gone mainstream, still no one cares that the leaders in our field were there first. Everyone today appears to believe they have invented psychedelics.
The next wave of our field appears to be in the continuing unfoldment of the participatory turn, which completely upended transpersonal psychology’s previous incarnation as a Ken Wilber one-stop-shop of perennialism. Previously, transpersonal psychology was basically the American self-help ethic melded with its interpretation of Asian male, patriarchal, spiritual traditions, with nonduality seen as the ultimate goal for everyone and every culture, leading to the spiritual narcissism rampant in New Age culture.
Out of this unfolding has come many new directions: inclusion of Indigenous and BIPOC spiritualities, and work by feminist scholars to unpack the gender bias of the religious traditions upheld by transpersonal psychology as the ultimate, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. Lahood (2007) also talks about the emerging relational perspective instead of the view that spirituality is a lone, individual pursuit. Spirituality is an embodied and shared event.
Somatics and embodiment are part of this continuing unfoldment of the participatory perspective. In transpersonal psychology’s first phase, the body was seen as a tool to get to enlightenment rather than of spiritual value in and of itself.
Friedman (2002) and others believe that the future of our field should be to embrace scientism and prove ourselves to the mainstream. Daniels (2013) posits the fact that our field is isolated from mainstream psychology as a problem. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps the way that transpersonal psychology was in the vanguard about psychedelics which are now rampant in the mainstream, show that it is our identity to be in the vanguard. Popular culture exhibits an insatiable interest in the topics of our field: parapsychology, altered states, near-death experiences, spirituality, secret and hidden sources of meaning. It is only if transpersonal psychology needs mainstream validation that our obscurity matters.
References
Daniels, M. (2013). Traditional roots, history, and evolution of the transpersonal perspective. In H. L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology (pp. 23-43). Wiley Blackwell.
Friedman, H. L. (2002). Transpersonal psychology as a scientific field. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 21, 175-187
© 2023 Catherine Auman
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