Tuesday, May 22, 2018   5:58 PM

Convention Spotlight: Parapsychology and Transpersonal Psychology in Dialogue

The integration of transpersonal psychology and parapsychology shows great promise for explaining extraordinary experiences and events better than can either approach alone. How do these two branches of thought differ and converge, and how do they complement each other? At the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, Harris Friedman (University of Florida), Dean Radin (Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences), and Stanley Krippner (Saybrook University) will be in dialogue to develop ways to bring these approaches into better alignment. Radin views the main focus of parapsychology as being research using mostly quantitative experimental, but also allowing for qualitative, methods designed to explore the nature of both extraordinary events and experiences, determining what they are and how they work. Friedman views transpersonal psychology as being more focused on extraordinary experiences, and differentiates the two approaches in terms of preferred research methods with transpersonal psychology using mostly qualitative, human-science approaches, but also allowing for quantitative methods. In addition, transpersonal psychology focuses on applied work, such as using psychotherapies to work with individuals and groups having or seeking extraordinary experiences. The discussion will be chaired by Stanley Krippner, a pioneer in consciousness research whose work straddles both areas.

 
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