Integral Psychology
140 pages
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140 pages
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Description

Integral Psychology connects Eastern and Western approaches to psychology and healing. Psychology in the East has focused on our inner being and spiritual foundation of the psyche. Psychology in the West has focused on our outer being and the wounding of the body-heart-mind and self. Each requires the other to complete it, and in bringing them together an integral view of psychology comes into view.

The classical Indian yogas are used as a way to see psychotherapy: psychotherapy as behavior change or karma yoga; psychotherapy as mindfulness practice or jnana yoga; psychotherapy as opening the heart or bhakti yoga. Finally, an integral approach is suggested that synthesizes traditional Western and Eastern practices for healing, growth, and transformation.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part 1: Integral Psychology

1. Integrality

2. Our Psychic Center

3. The Core Wounding of Our Time

4. An Evolutionary Vision of Health

Part 2: Integral Psychotherapy

5. Psychotherapy As Behaviorial Change: Karma Yoga

6. Psychotherapy As Mindfulness Practice: Jnana Yoga

7. Psychotherapy As Opening the Heart: Bhakti Yoga

8. Designing Psychotherapy for the Right Brain, the Left Brain, and the Soul

Appendix A. The Philosophical Foundation of Integral Psychology
Appendix B. An Integral Approach to Spiritual Emergency

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 10 mars 2010
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780791480137
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 1 Mo

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Extrait

INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY
SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology Richard D. Mann, editor
Integral Psychology
Yoga, Growth, and Opening the Heart
Brant Cortright
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
2007 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384
Production by Michael Haggett Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cortright, Brant, 1949-
Integral psychology : yoga, growth, and opening the heart / Brant Cortright. p. ; cm. - (SUNY series in transpersonal and humanistic psychology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7071-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7072-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychotherapy-Philosophy. 2. Holistic medicine. I. Title. II. Series [DNLM: 1. Psychotherapy. 2. Holistic Health. 3. Mind-Body Relations (Metaphysics) 4. Spirituality. 5. Yoga-psychology. WM 420 C831i 2007] RC437.5.C67 2007 616.89 14-dc22
2006016538
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the Divine Shakti, Mother of the Universe
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Integral Psychology
Chapter 1 . Integrality
Chapter 2 . Our Psychic Center
Chapter 3 . The Core Wounding of Our Time
Chapter 4 . An Evolutionary Vision of Health
Part 2: Integral Psychotherapy
Chapter 5 . Psychotherapy As Behavior Change: Karma Yoga
Chapter 6 . Psychotherapy As Mindfulness Practice: Jnana Yoga
Chapter 7 . Psychotherapy As Opening the Heart: Bhakti Yoga
Chapter 8 . Designing Psychotherapy for the Right Brain, the Left Brain, and the Soul
Appendix A . The Philosophical Foundation of Integral Psychology
Appendix B . An Integral Approach to Spiritual Emergency
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many helpful friends, colleagues, students, and clients for their impact in shaping this book. Paul Herman first invited me to co-teach a course on Integral Psychology with him some 20 years ago, which eventually evolved into a course I currently teach yearly at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Paul s support at an early phase of my involvement in integral yoga was important to my continuing to work in this field. I am eternally grateful for this early collaboration.
Many colleagues, friends, and former students have read chapters of this manuscript and provided both critical feedback and encouragement. Among these are Michael Kahn, Robert McDermott, Brendan Collins, Bahman Shirazi, Richard Stein, Bryan Wittine, Paul Linn, Olga Louchakova, Matthijs Cornelissen, Neeltje Huppes, Ananda Reddy, Aster Patel, Uma Silbey, Kathleen Wall, and Nicolo Santilli. Mytrae Meliana read the entire manuscript and gave invaluable feedback that greatly enhanced the final result.
The staff at SUNY Press has been extremely helpful and highly professional. I want to thank Jane Bunker, Editor-in-Chief, for her guidance in this project and Michael Haggett for his precise and helpful editing.
I am deeply grateful to all.
Introduction
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
-Rudyard Kipling, The Sayings of Rudyard Kipling
Eastern and Western visions of psychology have lived in different worlds until recently. While they have begun to touch and even have some influence on each other, a wider synthesis has not yet occurred. In part, this is because Western psychological systems tend to be separative, dividing into competing schools and theories, and because spiritual systems also separate along a great divide, with seemingly mutually exclusive approaches to Spirit. Integrating the many streams of spirituality in a way that does not privilege one over the others has so far been elusive.
This book attempts a far-reaching integration of the East s and West s rich diversity of psychological thought. It brings together many things-East and West, body and mind, spirituality and psychology-to create an integral psychology and psychotherapy. It grows out of several decades of involvement in both Eastern and Western psychology and more than 20 years immersion in Sri Aurobindo s integral yoga. For much of this time, my interests in spirituality and psychology moved along parallel tracks. Synthesizing these two directions into a unifying vision took much time and experimentation, traveling in different directions that sometimes were fruitful but other times came to dead ends. My teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies has been crucial in integrating these two dimensions of human existence.
The integral yoga and integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo is a gold mine of spiritual and psychological wisdom. What is hard to understand is why his philosophy is not better known, not only in the West but in India as well. While efforts have been made to popularize his writings, using philosophy as the medium for this has not yielded notable results thus far. My own hope is that this may happen through psychology, and this book charts some first steps toward an integral approach to healing, growth, and transformation.
A B RIEF D IGRESSION INTO THE S PIRITUAL C ONTEXT
( Note: At this point, the interested reader is encouraged to read a fuller account provided in appendix A .)
All psychological systems arise within a particular spiritual and philosophical context and construct their view of the human being from basic assumptions embedded in this context. Whether this philosophical context is materialistic or spiritual has profound implications for the psychology that emerges. The field of psychology was born and grew up in a materialistic atmosphere. Freud, the founder of modern depth psychology, was adamantly atheistic, and his theories and most of those that followed him reflected this bias. Academic psychology, attempting to mimic the natural sciences in its early years, also excluded spirituality from research and hewed to a purely empirical, materialistic paradigm.
This book presupposes that it is better to explicitly examine the spiritual context than to suffer the consequences of unexamined, implicit assumptions in our psychological systems. In a materialistic philosophy that holds biology to be ultimate, psychologies that proceed from this assumption lead to certain conclusions about consciousness, behavior, and the possibilities for human growth. Even the idea of healing, of what is possible and how far it can go, is skewed by this context, for the healing force is seen to be entirely physical rather than spiritual, and this severely limits the possibilities that can be envisioned. On the other hand, when our spiritual nature is affirmed as the foundation of human consciousness, the psychologies that emerge from this view are radically different in how they view the psyche and its potentials. The greatest thinkers from the religious traditions of the world are unanimous in their verdict that failing to see the spiritual dimension of human consciousness as fundamental leads to limited and ultimately incorrect psychologies.
Informed by a postmodern sensibility that acknowledges the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts operative in the construction of all knowledge, psychology has been undergoing a quiet revolution. Knowledge, according to postmodern thinking, can be constructed from infinite perspectives, and therefore there must be a plurality of viewpoints that have truth value. Here postmodernism and Eastern spiritual systems coincide. They come to the same fundamental position, namely, that the human mind can never know Truth . Mental knowing is inherently perspectival and partial, so it is incapable of truth unalloyed.
This is precisely what the East has said for more than 2,000 years: Ultimate truth is beyond the mind s grasp. The futility of mind s attempt to grasp truth is an astonishing point of agreement between ancient traditions and postmodernism.
However, here postmodernism continues on and makes another, entirely unjustified assertion: Therefore, there is no ultimate truth . Postmodernism leaps beyond its own recognized limits to assert a claim that it has just conceded cannot be made, an observation made by several commentators but that has not yet corrected the problem (e.g., see Smith, 1982.) It is a seductive leap, yet a strictly postmodern position can only be agnostic on the question of ultimate truth.
While postmodernism helpfully shows how personal perspective shapes the construction of knowledge, postmodernism, by its incapacity to penetrate beyond surface appearances, does psychology a disservice in denying all deeper realities and essentialist claims to truth. All psychologies rooted in postmodernism will thus be psychologies of the surface, helpful so far as they go but confined to a view of frontal appearances. A unifying view of psychology therefore requires a more encompassing perspective.
Here Eastern psychology comes to the rescue. The Eastern traditions declare that there is an essential truth, an essential spiritual reality that is known by many names, imaged in many forms, including formlessness, represented by the mind in infinite ways yet beyond all concepts and formulations. To go beyond the surface mind and experience this deeper reality is the goal of Eastern practices. When the goal is wholeness, only methodologies that go beyond the mind s fragmentary approaches can comprehend this wholeness.
When Swami Vivekananda first brought Hinduism to the West at the dawn of the 20th century, he co

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