Origin of the word “Transpersonal.” Miles Vich (1988), former editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and executive director of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, has documented the various historical psychological and philosophical uses of the term “transpersonal.” He notes that “there seems to be no record of ‘transpersonal psychology’ as a phrase, name or title being used prior to the 1967-1969 discussions among Anthony Sutich, Abraham Maslow, Stanislov Grof, Viktor Frankl, and James Fadiman. There were, however, use of the single term “transpersonal” much earlier in the century” (Vich, 1988, p. 108) by William James and Carl Jung, and later by Erich Neumann.
William James’s “trans-personal” meaning interpersonal. William James is credited with the first English-language use of the term “trans-personal’ in a course syllabus at Harvard in 1905-1906 to refer to the specific idea that an “object” may be “trans-personal” in the sense that “my object is also your object” (Vich, 1988, p. 109). “James had used the term ‘transpersonal’ in a course description at Harvard in 1905-1906 to describe the concept of ‘outside of’ or ‘beyond’ in relation to how humans experience the world” (Taylor, 1999, p. 274).
C. G. Jung’s “transpersonal” meaning “collective unconscious.” C. G. Jung, who emphasized archetypes and the transcendent function in personality functioning, used the term ueberpersonlich in reference to contents of the collective unconscious in his 1917 book titled Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (Jung, 1917). The term was translated as “”superpersonal” in 1914 and later as “transpersonal” in 1942. For instance, in the section,” The Psychology of Unconscious Processes” of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Jung, 1953), Chapter 5 is titled, “The Personal and the Collective (Transpersonal) Unconscious.”
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We have to distinguish between a personal unconscious and an impersonal or transpersonal unconscious. We speak of the latter also as the collective unconscious, because it is detached from anything personal and is entirely universal, and because its contents can be found everywhere, which is naturally not the case with the personal contents. The personal unconscious contains lost memories, painful ideas that are repressed (i.e., forgotten on purpose), subliminal perceptions, by which are meant sense-perceptions that were not strong enough to reach consciousness, and finally, contents that are not yet ripe for consciousness. It corresponds to the figure of the shadow so frequently met with in dreams (Jung, 1953, p. 65).
In the following passage, Jung refers to the transpersonal as the “extra-human.”
The [dream symbol] points specifically to the extra-human, the transpersonal; for the contents of the collective unconscious are not only the residues of archaic, specifically human modes of functioning, but also the residues of functions from man’s animal ancestry, whose duration in time was infinitely grater than the relatively brief epoch of specifically human existence. (Jung, 1953, pp. 96-97)
C. C. Jung’s other uses of the term. Jung also used the term “transpersonal” to refer to the unconscious development of what he calls the “transpersonal control-point” or “guiding function [that]…gained influence over the resisting conscious mind without the patient noticing what was happening….a virtual goal, as it were, that expressed itself symbolically” (Jung, 1953, pp. 131-132). Elsewhere, Jung used to term “transpersonal” in relation to contents of the unconscious: “These transpersonal contents are not just inert or dead matter that can be annexed at will. Rather they are living entities which exert an attractive force upon the conscious mind” (Jung, 1953, p. 142).
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