Peak Experience

the peak experience is a way of describing pneumatic experience, and that the clamber up the peaks in search of spirit is the drive of the spirit in search of itself.

Hillman argues that Maslow's peak experience is structurally identical to traditional pneumatic or spiritual experience, and that its language of absolutism and self-validation reproduces the confusion of spirit with soul in psychological theory.

Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis

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The model for the positive transcendence of our pathologies is called the 'peak experience.' 'Peak' evokes the work of Abraham Maslow, who fathered and still epitomizes the main attitudes of contemporary psychological humanism.

Hillman identifies the peak experience as the normative model of psychological humanisms's transcendence of pathology, criticizing it as the ideological centerpiece of a movement that evades depth and shadow.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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The proactivert has no dread, no neurosis, no symptoms, no defenses. His life is full of peak experiences. 'He approaches every challenge and novel condition with the spirit of exultation.'

Hillman exposes the humanistic fantasy undergirding the peak experience ideal by citing Bonner's 'proactivert' type — a figure without pathology whose life is constituted entirely by peak experiences — as a reductio ad absurdum of the movement.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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common psychological constructs that contain a self-transcendent aspect, including mindfulness, flow, peak experiences, mystical-type experiences, and certain positive emotions (e.g., love, awe).

Yaden et al. situate peak experiences within an integrative taxonomy of self-transcendent experiences, unified by reduced self-salience and increased connectedness, and propose this framework as a basis for empirical research.

Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017thesis

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peak experiences (Maslow, 1964), and 'mystical' experiences (Hood, 1975, 2003; James, 1902; Newberg & d'Aquili, 2000). Each of these otherwise quite different constructs has been described in theoretical writing and in psychometric scales as having aspects related to reduced self-salience and/or enhanced connectedness.

Yaden places peak experiences in explicit comparative relation with mystical experience and other self-transcendent states, arguing that all share a family resemblance defined by diminished ego-salience.

Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017supporting

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transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy, exceptionally strong positive affect (peace, tranquility, serenity, bliss), a special feeling of sacredness, transcendence of time and space, experience of pure being ('eternity now and infinity here').

Grof's phenomenology of cosmic unity experience in LSD psychotherapy maps closely onto Maslow's peak-experience characteristics, grounding the construct in perinatal and transpersonal psychodynamics rather than humanistic self-actualization theory.

Grof, Stanislav, Varieties of Transpersonal Experiences: Observations from LSD Psychotherapy, 1972supporting

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Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

Bibliographic citation confirming Maslow's 1964 monograph as the foundational text for the peak experience construct as mobilized throughout Yaden's integrative review.

Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017aside

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