Early critics such as Ernest Hilgard have viewed it as a fringe movement that attracted extreme followers of humanistic psychology, while scholars such as Eugene Taylor have acknowledged the field's interdisciplinary approach, at the same time noting its epistemological and practical challenges.
Early use of the term "transpersonal" can also be credited to Stanislav Grof and Anthony Sutich, who were dissatisfied with the humanistic psychology movement and included spirituality in their new framework.
[6] The institute was founded by Robert Frager and James Fadiman[citation needed] in response to an academic climate that they felt was hostile to such ideas.
[7] Other proponents of transpersonal psychology included Ram Dass; Elmer and Alyce Green who were affiliated with the Menninger Foundation;[5] and Ken Wilber.
[5][8][9] Transpersonal psychology has been influenced by various Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, which emphasize practices like meditation, mindfulness, and the dissolution of the ego.
In 1969, Anthony Sutich, along with Maslow and other humanistic psychologists, founded the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, formally establishing the field.
Transpersonal psychology focuses on exploring spiritual experiences, mystical states, self-transcendence, and the holistic development of human potential.
[11] In 1998, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the holistic studies program at the John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, which included a transpersonal psychology department.
[13][14][15][16][3][17][excessive citations] Concurrently, there was an increase in membership for the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, stabilizing at approximately 3000 members in the early nineties.
[25] Ellis has also questioned the scientific status of transpersonal psychology, and its relationship to religion, mysticism and authoritarian belief systems.
[28] Eugene Taylor, a humanistic psychologist affiliated with Harvard University, viewed transpersonal psychology as "philosophically naive, poorly financed, at times almost anti-intellectual, and frequently overrated as far as its influences", while at the same time noting the field's "integrated approach to understanding the phenomenology of scientific method", "centrality of qualitative research", and its emphasised "importance of interdisciplinary communication".
Among the factors that contributed to this situation was mainstream psychology's "resistance to spiritual and philosophical ideas", and the tendency of transpersonal psychologists to isolate themselves from the larger field.
[46] Although the perspective of transpersonal psychology has spread to a number of interest groups across the US and Europe, its origins were in California, and the field has always been strongly associated with institutions on the west coast of the US.
[33] Both the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and the forerunner to Sofia University were founded in the state of California, and a number of the fields leading theorists come from this area of the US.