A history of humanistic and transpersonal psychology is presented as a backdrop to examining both the weak and the strong points of transpersonal psychology proper. On the negative side, transpersonal psychology can be faulted for being philosophically naive, poorly financed, at times almost anti-intellectual, and frequently overrated as far as its influences. On the plus side, it presents an integrated approach to understanding 1)the phenomenology of scientific method, 2) the centrality of qualitative research for the future of the discipline, and 3) the importance of interdisciplinary communication. In the final analysis, its virtues outweigh its defects, and they prophecize new trends beyond the current revolution in the neurosciences.Transpersonal psychology, if known to mainstream psychologists at all, is most often associated with New Age crystal gazers, astrologers, believers in witchcraft, drug users, meditators, occultists, spiritual healers, martial artists, and other purveyors of pop psychology, in short; everything mat a truly legitimate scientific and academic psychology is not. The stereotype is, of course, inaccurate. For, like the fabled philosopher's stone, its seemingly weird exterior masks a more important philosophical challenge, the full articulation and subsequent flowering of which may yet prove to be the undoing of the reductionistic mainstream. The problem is that no survey of its history and meaning up to the present publication has been able to tease out which half of the Transpersonal movement is the chaff and which the wheat. Herein is one attempt at the riddle.This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.