Bill Swartley

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

Dr. Swartley was the founder of the Centers for the Whole Person in Philadelphia, Mays Landing, NJ, New York, and Toronto. He was also a founder, in 1973, of the International Primal Association and was its first Executive Secretary. He 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.

Swartley was influenced by the work of Carl Jung, Roberto Assagioli, R.D. Laing, Frederick Leboyer, Fritz Perls, Alexander Lowen, Stanislav Grof, Alan Watts, Thomas Verny, Paul Bindrim and many others.

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:

Primal Integration is one of a number of primally oriented human maturation techniques which have evolved during the 1970's...The third 'new' thing about primal techniques is the adaption I have developed for use with average, maturing adults, called Primal Integration. Primal Integration utilizes regressive techniques with average adults within an educational rather than a therapeutic framework. That is, Primal Integration rejects the authoritarian medical model of treatment, and is an education rather than a therapy...Primal Integration, is a contribution of the Encounter Group Movement which began on the East and West coasts of the United States during 1962, grandfathered by Maslow and Perls. Thus, Primal Integration may be viewed historically as a child of the union of regressive psychotherapy and the Encounter Movement. (Swartley1975)

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.

Dr. Johann-Georg Raben (Ph.D.), a German Psychologist, has written his doctoral dissertation (approx. 600 pages) about Bill Swartley's therapeutic approach. Raben 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, and by citing (in German translation) various papers that he received from Swartley, and commenting on them. The title of the dissertation is: William Swartleys Integrative Primärtherapie ("Primal Integration"). Raben received his doctoral degree in 1984 at the Psychological Institute of the University of Salzburg, Austria. -- In the years 1978-1982 Raben had had a post of "wissenschaftlicher Assistent" (scientific assistant) at the Institute for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Technical University (TU) of Munich, led by the psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Prof. Dr. med. et phil. Albert Görres (see Wikipedia), who sympathized with Arthur Janov's Primal Therapy und used Primal techniques. Raben's job at the institute was to collect literature about the different "cathartic therapies". This voluminous collection of literature (including papers about Swartley's Primal Integration) was around 1995 conferred into the archive of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) in Freiburg im Breisgau, Southern Germany. It is there available under the keyword "Sammlung Dr. Raben". (See also Raben's Homepage: johann-georg-raben.de) – William Swartley has, in 1954, delivered a master's thesis 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. In this thesis, much about the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung can be found.