Demarcations
Transpersonal psychology can be confused with Parapsychology. This may sometimes happen due to the overlapping and unconventional research interests of both fields. In short; parapsychology tends to focus more in its subject matter on the "psychic", while transpersonal psychology tends to focus on the "spiritual" (relatively crude though these categorizations are, it is still a useful distinction in this context). While parapsychology leans more towards traditional scientific epistemology (laboratory experiments, statistics, research on cognitive states), transpersonal psychology tends to be more closely related to the epistemology of the humanities and the hermeneutic disciplines (humanism, existentialism, phenomenology, anthropology), although it has always included contributions involving experimental and statistical research.
Transpersonal psychology may also, sometimes, be associated with New Age beliefs. Although the transpersonal perspective has many overlapping interests with theories and thinkers associated with the term "New Age", it is still problematic to place transpersonal psychology within such a framework. Transpersonal psychology is an academic discipline, not a religious or spiritual movement, and some of the field's leading authors, among those Sovatsky, have criticized the nature of New Age discourse. Associations between transpersonal psychology and the New Age have probably contributed to the failures in the United States of America to get transpersonal psychology more formally recognised within the professional body, the American Psychological Association (APA).
Nowadays the distinction between transpersonal psychology and the psychology of religion, according to The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, is fading.
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