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lecture by Stanislav Grof

lecture by Stanislav Grof

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Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist with over fifty years experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he also received his scientific training – an M.D. degree from the Charles University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine) – from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. His early research was in the clinical uses of psychoactive drugs, conducted at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. There he was Principal Investigator of a program systematically exploring the heuristic and therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelic substances.

In 1967, he was invited to be Clinical and Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. After completion of this two-year fellowship, he remained in the US and continued his research as Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Henry Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. In 1973, Dr. Grof became Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he lived until 1987. He spent this time writing books and articles, giving seminars and lectures worldwide, and developing Holotropic Breathwork with Christina Grof, now deceased.

Stanislav Grof is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and founding president of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA). In this role, he organized, jointly with Christina, large international conferences in the United States, India, Australia, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil. At present, he Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), teaching in the department of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness.

In 2016, Stan married Brigitte Grof. The couple divide their time between Mill Valley, California, and Wiesbaden, Germany. Stan continues to write and conduct lectures and seminars.

Above: Stan and Brigitte Grof

At the 25th Anniversary Convocation of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP), held in August 1993 at Asilomar, California, Stanislav Grof received an Honorary Award for major contributions toand development of the field of transpersonal psychology. On October 5, 2007, he was granted the prestigious Award>>Vision 97<< from the Vaclav and Dagmar Havel Foundation in Prague. He also was invited as a special consultant for the Hollywood movies Brainstorm and Millenium.

Among his publications are over 150 articles in professional journals, and , which have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Estonian, Latvian, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

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Stanislav Grof

Dr. Stanislav Grof’s professional career has covered a period of over 60 years in which his primary interest has been research of the therapeutic potential of a large subgroup of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have great therapeutic, transformative, heuristic, and evolutionary potential. He coined for these states the term “holotropic,” meaning literally “moving toward wholeness (from the Greek holos = whole and trepo/trepein = moving toward something). His research activity can be divided into the following periods:

• Four years of laboratory research of psychedelics – LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, adrenochrome, adrenolutine, and tryptamine derivatives – DMT, DET, and DPT (1956-1960. In the year1960-1967 Dr.Grof spent as Principal Investigator of the psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
• This was followed by seven years of research of psychedelic psychotherapy in the Baltimore, MD. The first two of these years, he worked as Clinical and Research Fellow at the Henry Phipps Clinic of The Johns Hopkins University and in the Research Unit of the Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, MD. The following five years, he held the position of Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins and Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville, MD. In this capacity he headed for several years the last surviving official research project of psychedelic therapy in the USA.
• From 1973 until 1987, he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he developed jointly with his late wife Christina, Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful non-pharmacological form of self-exploration and psychotherapy combining accelerated breathing, evocative music, and a special form of bodywork.

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