Professor Brant Cortright, PhD, the program director of CIIS’s Integral Counseling Psychology program, recently published his second book entitled Integral Psychology: Yoga, Growth, and Opening the Heart (State University of New York Press, 2007). In Integral Psychology, Cortright draws connections between Eastern and Western approaches to psychology and healing.

“Psychology in the East has focused on our inner being and spiritual foundation of the psyche. Psychology in the West has focused on our outer being and the wounding of the body-heart-mind and self,” Professor Cortright writes in the book’s introduction. “Each requires the other to complete it, and in bringing them together an integral view of psychology comes into view.”

The book grew out of Professor Cortright’s more than 20 years of immersion in Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and in his involvement in both Eastern and Western psychology. “Synthesizing these two directions into a unifying vision took much time and experimentation, traveling in two directions that sometimes were fruitful but other times came to dead ends,” he says. “Teaching at CIIS has been crucial in integrating these two dimensions of human existence.”

The book is divided into two sections: part one brings integrality to bear on psychology, while part two brings integrality to bear on psychotherapy practice. Professor Cortright uses classical Indian yogas as a way to see psychotherapy: psychotherapy as behavior change or karma yoga; psychotherapy as mindfulness practice or jnana yoga; psychotherapy as opening the heart or bhakti yoga. Finally, he suggests an integral approach that synthesizes traditional Western and Eastern practices for healing, growth, and transformation.

Brant Cortright earned his PhD (1976) at Union Institute in Ohio. In addition to this book, he is the author of Psychotherapy and Spirit (State University of New York Press, 1997).