Is Transpersonal a Spiritual Psychology?

Abstract

Transpersonal psychology has at times been equated with a spiritual psychology. While there is a keen interest in the study of spiritual experiences, this characterization overly narrows the scope of the transpersonal area and blurs vital distinctions between metaphysics and psychology. Transpersonal psychologists have criticized the field of psychology for both pathologizing and marginalizing intense spiritual experiences that may have powerful transformative effects on individuals and societies. Yet inclusion of these phenomena requires more than the addition of a category alongside depression, self-efficacy, and rumination. Legitimizing these experiences exposes and confronts conventional Western reality assumptions covertly embedded in much of psychology. At the same time, challenging Western metaphysics does not open the door for the insertion of spiritual or other metaphysical systems into psychology: a psychology that adopts spiritual ontologies is no longer a psychology, but a spiritual system that has incorporated psychological language. Transpersonal psychology can be more effective as a subdiscipline that engages in respectful and critical dialogue with spiritual traditions from the stance of an open scientific naturalism, while also critiquing much of scientific psychology for culturally inspired biases against certain categories of human experience.