Stanislav Grof

Stanislav Grof, born in Prague in 1931, is a Czech-born American psychiatrist and one of the principal developers of transpersonal psychology. He took his medical degree at Charles University in 1957 and trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, then led early clinical research on LSD and other psychedelic substances at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. After moving to the United States in 1967 he worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and from 1973 he lived for many years at the Esalen Institute. He was founding president of the International Transpersonal Association in 1977. With his wife Christina he developed a drug-free method of deep breathing, music and bodywork, and he proposed an expanded cartography of the human psyche that includes perinatal and transpersonal levels.