Towards a Postsecular Society

Transpersonal psychology

The transpersonal tradition of Jung, Hillman, Grof, Maslow and Wilber pursued a vision embracive of the spiritual quite different to the previous two strands. Its origins, ironically, are with Freud, one of the 20th century’s most sceptical voices on religion. His immediate disciple and successor, Carl Gustav Jung, took most of Freud’s psychoanalytical insights, but shed the aversion to the language of religion, finding instead important psychological insights in the Gnostic, Hermetic, Neoplatonist and Alchemical traditions. True, this was not mainstream Christianity, but this opening in the 20th century for presecular spiritual insights has been a significant route for the spiritual, enabling it to bypass the secular extremes of that age and emerge into the 21st century with clear voice.