Transpersonal psychology is widely treated as a fringe field within academic psychology.

Its core preoccupations of altered states, mysticism, and spirituality did not disappear but migrated.

A field can lose its institutional home and still win the argument it was making.

Transpersonal psychology is usually spoken of in the past tense. Ask a psychology graduate student what it is, and you will likely get a shrug, maybe a vague reference to Maslow or Grof if they are historically astute, or maybe you’ll get a joke about the 1960s and 1970s.

The flagship journals in transpersonal psychology arguably have a fraction of the readership they once did, and few doctoral programs still bear the name. The professional associations that once anchored the field have thinned considerably. By some institutional measures, transpersonal psychology looks like a field that is dying.

Nonetheless, almost everything transpersonal psychology was preoccupied with is now mainstream. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is studied at some of the most prestigious universities in the world now. Contemplative neuroscience and mind-body research have their own well-funded corner of cognitive science and health science research. Post-traumatic growth, peak experience, creative flow,........

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