Semester Update | Catherine Auman

Semester Update

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Semester Update

I have found this semester so far to be exciting and full of lots of delicious morsels to chew on. I seem to be always thinking of this, that, and the other thing from the assigned reading, and it has affected my sleep because I just want to stay up and think about things. At first, I thought reading 400 pages a week would not be doable, but after I got into the swing of it and organized my time, it seems like the bare minimum to become well-versed in the field. I have enjoyed this concentrated reading into subjects I deeply care about, and the others that I don’t particularly enjoy I’m happy to read because I need to know about these subjects.

As I got my masters in transpersonal psychology in 1984, the field has changed quite a bit since then. I was aware of the impact of Jorge Ferrer’s publication of his participatory theory, as I read it a few years after it came out and was quite stunned. It is wonderful to catch up and find out all the other changes that have happened in the field up to the present: the moving away from the one-stop-shop of Ken Wilbur, the addition of the points of view of women and people of color, and the more holistic definitions of the field.

I guess I hadn’t understood how much change would be necessary to turn into an official scholar. I welcome it, but I was unprepared. The best analogy for me is to think of how the best artists, even if they are contemporary and completely nonrepresentational, have studied all the artists of the past in great depth and even emulated them in their training. In the same way, to become a decent transpersonal psychologist, it will be necessary to become as well-read as possible in all the great minds and work of those who’ve come before.

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