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This paper presents a preliminary description of A Transpersonal Feminist Approach to Family

Systems (ATFAFS) as taught at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP) between 1995

and 2002. In this approach, students studied the principles of Murray Bowen’s family systems

theory with attention to feminist revisions of the theory while simultaneously investigating

their own multigenerational family histories. Additionally, students kept a journal, recorded

and worked with their dreams, and worked with a chosen creative expressive modality. They

may also have worked with other transpersonal modalities. Student narratives, informed by

organic inquiry, illustrate aspects of the approach. The paper concludes with …

Since Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the early 1980s, black feminists and

feminists of color have created a rich, soulful body of scholarly work. Contributions to

womanist thought have emerged primarily in the fields of theology and ethics. The aim

of this article is to put womanism in historical context, examine transpersonal expression

in womanist scholarship, and to articulate the values that inform emotional healing in a

womanist context. Womanism is spiritualized due to its original definition and subsequent

development, making transpersonal thought a resonant fit for unearthing paths to authentic

cultural competency in psychology and other disciplines.

A gendered analysis of social and religious values in 5th century BCE illuminates the Athenian

decline from democracy to bully empire, through pursuit of a faux virility. Using a feminist

hermeneutics of suspicion, the study contrasts two playwrights bookending the empire:

Aeschylus, who elevated the sky pantheon Olympians and demoted both actual Athenian

women and the Furies—deities linked to maternal ties and nature, and Sophocles, who granted

Oedipus, his maternal incest purified, an apotheosis in the Furies’ grove. The latter work,

presented at the Athenian tragic festival some 50 years after the first, advocated restoration

of respect for female flesh …

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