William Moyer Swartley

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 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".