Some developmental issues in transpersonal experience

Journal/Book: J Mind Behav. 1995; 16: PO Box 522, Village Station, New York, NY 10014. Inst Mind Behavior Inc. 115-134.

Abstract: Developmental understanding of transpersonal experience and its diverse impact on human life has been bedeviled by the opposed, monolithic extremes of Freud's regression to infant ''narcissism,'' on the one hand, and more recent views of the transpersonal as the sole endpoint for any ''higher'' or ''postformal operations'' development of human intelligence, on the other. Here it is shown that ''higher states of consciousness'' can be more specifically understood as developments of a ''presentational'' intelligence, thereby constituting one line of adult development among the several open to our symbolic capacity. The demonstrated but relatively infrequent occurrence of transpersonal states in early childhood then becomes understandable as a developmental precocity akin to that shown in mathematical and musical prodigies. The overlap of this developmental line with some of the thematics and regressive states of psychoanalytic object relations theories of infancy follows from the experiential nature of presentational intelligence. Early emotional traumata and deficits must reappear in transpersonal experience to the extent that they were internalized as part of the mother-infant dyad whose structure underlies our symbolic, dialogic consciousness.

Note: Article HT Hunt, Brock Univ, Dept Psychol, St Catharines, on L2S 3A1, Canada

Keyword(s): COGNITIVE-PSYCHOLOGY; 2 PATTERNS; CONSCIOUSNESS; STATES; PSYCHOPATHOLOGY; TRANSCENDENCE; CHILDHOOD; SPECTRUM; INFANTS

Zurück | Weiter