In this book, Michael Washburn provides a psychoanalytic foundation for transpersonal psychology. Using psychoanalytic theory, Washburn explains how ego development both prepares for and creates obstacles to ego transcendence. Spiritual development, he proposes, can be properly understood only in terms of the ego development that precedes it. For example, many difficulties encountered in spiritual development can be traced to repressive underpinnings of ego development, and significant gender differences in spiritual development can be traced to corresponding gender differences that emerge...

The links between madness, creative genius, and spiritual experiences have tantalized philosophers and scientists for centuries. In Healing the Split, John Nelson brings the lofty ideas of transpersonal psychology down to earth so they can be applied in a practical way to explain the bizarre effects of insanity on the human mind. Drawing on a vast knowledge of Eastern philosophy and mainstream neuropsychiatry, he heals the split between orthodox and alternative views with a comprehensive approach that goes beyond both. Starting where R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz left off, Nelson revises and...

This new edition is a thorough revision of the first edition. Drawing on both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology and on both Eastern and Western spiritual sources, the book maps the course of human development from the earliest stages of ego development to the highest stages of ego transcendence. Washburn formulates an important paradigm for transpersonal psychology and clearly distinguishes it from the other major paradigm in the field, the structural-hierarchical paradigm of Ken Wilber.

In Washburn's view, human development is a spiral movement played out between the ego and its...