By: Harald Walach
Year: 2013
This chapter briefly discusses the history of psychology as a discipline and the history and sources of transpersonal psychology as a subdomain in order to explain the frictions and possible points of departure. The author points out some criticisms and unsolved problems and develops a future perspective. He recommends to reinvent the transpersonal enterprise along the lines originally intended by the founding fathers of psychology, William James and Franz Brentano: a psychology, a science—and culture—of consciousness, in order to get rid of some of the problems besetting transpersonal psychology. In order to understand why the newly inaugurated transpersonal psychology has not convinced others that its approach is truly innovative and is helping to transform people to access their higher potential, it is important to now turn to what has been termed the spiritual positivism of transpersonal psychology, and also to the epistemological questions involved.