I was combing through and updating all the links on this site earlier today when I stumbled upon this video of Michael Daniels on his Transpersonal Science site. I like Dr. Daniels’ critical approach to transpersonal psychology, a field too often bogged down by fuzzy thinking and/or cultish attachment to particular schools of thought:
“Retrospective and Challenges for Transpersonal Psychology”. Michael Daniels PhD talks on the history, status, criticisms and future of Transpersonal Psychology. Keynote paper delivered at the British Psychological Society Transpersonal Psychology Section 15th Annual Conference, Cober Hill, Scarborough, 17th September 2011.
Thanks for posting this. I read “Shadow, Self, Spirit” and there was certainly much of value. Daniels, however, is about secularizing transpersonal psychology, leaving any idea of “god” or the “divine” out of the discussion. What he espouses is really humanistic psychology, and that’s fine, but the truly unique and fascinating thing about transpersonal is its exploration of the unknowable.
Catherine,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the issue of how to best articulate the principles and practices of transpersonal psychology is tricky. Like Daniels, I tend to translate things into secular terms, including concepts of god and the divine. In my experience, I have found that those two concepts mean very different things to different people, and so I haven’t figured out how to make good use of them when getting down to core principles. I agree that exploration of the unknowable is an important aspect of transpersonal psychology that distinguishes the field from humansitic psychology. However, I don’t see any reason why this exploration can’t effectively be done using secular terms, like how the concept of mindfulness has very effectively been applied to a variety of fields without relying on any religious terminology. Of course, precisely because so many people do indeed frame transpersonal experience in terms of god and the divine, these concepts cannot be left out of the discussion. I’ll have to ponder this some more…