Archetypal Astrology and Transpersonal Psychology:
The Research of Richard Tarnas and Stanislav Grof
Renn Butler
In the mid-1960’s, a young Czechoslovakian psychiatrist working at the Psychiatric 
Research Institute in Prague made some epoch-making discoveries concerning the 
fundamental structures of the human psyche. Working with a wide range of individuals 
involved in supervised LSD psychotherapy, Stanislav Grof and his clients encountered 
experiences that gradually and then irrevocably challenged the orthodox Freudian model 
in which he and his colleagues were working.
The content of the sessions suggested a far deeper understanding of the human psyche 
and the cosmos itself than had been previously imagined. After supervising 3,000 LSD 
sessions and studying the records of another 2,000, Grof eventually systematized a farreaching model that accounted for the observations of his client’s sessions, integrated the 
diversity of competing psychological theories, and reached into areas of human 
spirituality described by the great spiritual traditions of the world.
Stanislav Grof’s Expanded Cartography of the Human Psyche
In 1976, Grof and his partner Christina developed a comparable non-drug technique for 
entering non-ordinary states of consciousness, which they called Holotropic 
Breathwork™ (from holos=“wholeness”; and trepein=“moving toward”). Throughout his 
long career of more than fifty-five years of research using powerful drug and non-drug 
catalysts, Grof discovered that individuals who enter holotropic states of consciousness 
have access to three broad layers of experience.

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