Passages Beyond the Gate: A Jungian Approach to Understanding American Psychology

Examining American psychology's development from a Jungian perspective, Jennings argues that the discipline is at a point where a deeper and broader exploration of spirituality is essential in order to realize the goal of creating a complete psychology of human beings. Having already developed an understanding of the person that rests upon the tenets of behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, psychoanalytic, humanistic, and existential approaches, many mainstream American psychologists now seem eager to embrace a growing viewpoint of the person grounded in biological psychology, which draws the discipline closer to a materialistic understanding of human beings. This direction in American psychology reinforces a strikingly unbalanced viewpoint of human nature that does little to reveal the fullness and purpose of human spirituality. To address this deficiency, Jennings encourages more American psychologists to integrate spiritual concepts readily explored in transpersonal psychology with respect to our more traditional psychological understanding of what it means to be human.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Prologue Chapter 2 Acknowledgements Chapter 3 Introduction Chapter 4 Chapter 1: Exploring Passages that Reveal Human Nature: A Student's Journey Chapter 5 Chapter 2: Jungian Ways of Knowing and the Psychologies They Create Chapter 6 Chapter 3: The Role of the Inferior Fuction in Jungian Psychology Chapter 7 Chapter 4: One of These Psychologies is Unlike the Others Chapter 8 Chapter 5: Towards a Pyschology for All Pyschological Types Chapter 9 References Chapter 10 Index Chapter 11 About the Author

About the Author :
George-Harold Jennings earned his PhD in psychology at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. Prior to receiving his PhD, Jennings was a pre-doctoral fellow in clinical psychology at Yale School of Medicine. He is currently a member of the Department of Psychology and a staff psychologist at the McClintock Center for Counseling and Psychological Services at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Review :
In a clear and persuasive argument, Jennings suggests that, in order to move forward in understanding what it means to be a person, American psychology must break through the barrier constructed by the big three mainstream approaches…and embrace a promising fourth force which conceives of personality as entailing a transpersonal dimension. In Passages Beyond the Gate, Dr. Jennings calls American psychology to accountability for its own blind spots. Using Jung's discovery of the inevitable biasing of perspectives by personal typology, Jennings powerfully argues that the spiritual dimension of our human journey finds such short shrift in American psychology because of its privileging of the sensate, thinking, and feeling functions at the expense of the intuitive. When the intuitive function is restored to its proper equality with the others, then questions of 'meaning,' which so much psychology avoids, may be addressed with the respect they deserve. Intriguing and novel approach…. Jennings's monograph might be a worthwhile addition to a course in theories of psychotherapy and counseling…. By expanding the framework, it challenges the predominance of a psychology seen only as 'scientific.'