William Swartley (1927–1979) was an American psychologist who pioneered the primal integration mode of personal exploration.

Education
Swartley was educated at Haverford College, The University of Tübingen, the Jung Institute of Zurich, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the University of the Pacific, and during significant time spent in India. He authored a master's thesis in 1954, at the Faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, College of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. The title of the thesis is: The Relation of the Concept of the Function of the Analytical Psychologist and the Function of the "Guru" or Spiritual Guide of Hinduism. The thesis includes much about the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung.

Life 
Born in 1927 in the United States, Swartley was the founder of the Centers for the Whole Person in Philadelphia, Mays Landing, NJ, New York, Toronto, and London. He was also a founder, in 1973, of the International Primal Association and was its first Executive Secretary. He was active in the American Psychological Association and promoted international cooperation in psychology in his workshops throughout North America and Europe.

Swartley developed  'Primal Integration' starting from about 1962. He summarized this development as follows:

He devoted the last ten years of his life promoting primal integration through workshops, training, lectures, and writings until his death in 1979 at the age of 52.

Legacy 
The International Primal Association (IPA) is based in the US and  carries on and coordinates the work of individual practitioners of primal Integration  around the world.

Primal Integration practitioners engaged in a court struggle with Arthur Janov in 1974 when Janov claimed the word "Primal" as his own and tried to prevent them using it in their name. The court found against Janov but at great financial cost to the IPA.

Johann-Georg Raben, a German psychologist, wrote his doctoral dissertation about Swartley's therapeutic approach in 1984. He describes in his dissertation the history, theory and practice of Swartley's maturation techniques, based on his own experiences during two workshops led by Swartley in Bavaria, Germany, and London, England, around 1978. Raben subsequently collected  literature about the different "cathartic therapies". This voluminous collection of literature (including papers about Swartley's Primal Integration) was conferred into the archive of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) in Freiburg im Breisgau, Southern Germany around 1995. It remains there available under the keyword "Sammlung Dr. Raben".

References

External links 
 www.johann-georg-raben.de   Raben's Homepage

 
1927 births
1979 deaths
20th-century American psychologists
20th-century Canadian psychologists