Abstract

This paper aims to outline a contemporary reading of certain psychological aspects of the teaching brought to the West by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. In particular it focusses on aspects of this teaching which have relevance for modern day psychology with a view to creating spaces for conversations between some of the ideas of the major schools of thought in psychology and the coinciding resonances of those same ideas in Gurdjieff’s teaching. There are many such resonances, and given this, there is great potential for a meeting of the ideas of contemporary psychology and those of Gurdjieff’s teaching through such conversations. It is further argued that Gurdjieff’s teaching, or at least certain aspects of it, hold the potential to help extend our understanding of many matters of a psychological nature, and possibly in some instances to give psychologists new or different understandings of various phenomena of which we have limited or restricted understandings.