The Transpersonal Dimension—A Religious or a Psychoanalytic Construct?

Abstract

Tennes offers the “transpersonal” as a dimension that explains the origins of a variety of puzzling events and experiences that we encounter as therapists (and people). I suggest that Tennes's “mysterious ground of being” in which we are all rooted is not the only plausible explanation for such phenomena and that the notion of a purposeful, “superordinate field” is a religious rather than a psychological construct. I note my experiences of a dissonance between Tennes's attuned, experience-near clinical presentation and the highly generalized, experience-distant nature of the “Transpersonal Dimension,” and I offer a speculative framework for understanding this dissonance.

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Notes on contributors

Thomas Menaker

Thomas Menaker, Ph.D. is a Supervisor, William Alanson White Institute, Westchester Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, New York University, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.