Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transendence in Psychotherapy (Suny Series, Transpersonal & Humanistic Psychology)

I first encountered Stanislav Grof in the late 'seventies at a seminar held in Pacific Grove, California. He was a featured speaker, and to say that I was impressed would be an understatement.

In this book, he speaks of paradigms--the model of reality that scientists work within, accepting certain basic assumptions. He points out that the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm (a system of thought based on the work of Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes) is still accepted and the orthodox foundation of precepts in use in psychiatry, psychology, anthropology and medicine. He points out that physics has moved on to a new paradigm: relativity and quantum theory and beyond, while the previously named sciences have languished, and opines that it is time for them to re-examine their fundamental belief structure as well.

Grof said, at the seminar, that he was originally--in Czechoslovakia where he originated--a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian, until he began to perceive difficulties with that approach. He grew from there. He was one of the original medical investigators to use
d-lysergic acid diethylamide in serious psychiatric research, from which he derived some astonishing results.

Grof was formerly Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is no lightweight airhead, but rather is a highly qualified, credentialed and credible researcher. This and his other books are well worth your time, if you have the necessary vocabulary and the scientific background to benefit from them.

Grof makes a bold argument that understanding of the perinatal and transpersonal levels changes much of how we view both mental illness and mental health. His research in transpersonal experience evokes serious questions into such areas as reincarnation and the spritual side of the human being.

Joseph H. Pierre [...]


Preverbal Revelation   November 17, 1999
Yves Latorte (Columbia, MD USA)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

Read it in 1990 at the age of 29 and was not yet ready to be convinced. Reread it in 1999, older, humbler and still ailing, and found it to be a work so absorbing, so obviously true, that I became depressed at how entrenched medical orthodoxy has been and may continue to be. This book rethinks virtually all aspects of human maturation science, paying crucial attention to the simple observational facts of birthing and how they vary individual to individual in contributing to a staggering range of lasting psychopathologies. The result is one of the essential speculative works of the 20th century. It became the key to my own discovery of long harbored and misunderstood neuroses, and marked the beginning of a long campaign of recovery and personal transformation. This is a massive, clinically-worded text for the advanced psychology reader that testfies to the fact that events of lasting developmental significance happen to many people before the dawn of ego and conscious memory(age 3-4). If you've exhausted all other modern medical strategies for healing without finding whats wrong with you, and are ready to open the door to the huge new world waiting, this is the book. Grof is a caring, brave voice that always allows room for every imaginable personal particular. While it does not provide any firm mechanisms which relate transpersonal phenomena to the biochemical level of functioning, it poses many questions crucial to further investigation in the realm of pure consciousness. The one book by Grof that enters the deepest, most complete account of his thought.