June / July 2005

CONTEXTS FOR AN INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

— Don Eulert

BACKGROUND

In 1996, with a community advisory board and the Provost’s backing, our campus of the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) founded The Center for Integrative Psychology. One driving intention was to legitimize spirituality to mainstream psychology’s attention, at a time when you couldn’t use the two words (psychology and spirituality) in the same sentence. (I don’t think anybody on the Board, including myself, knew then of Ken Wilber’s work). The Mission Statement says:

Studying ‘wholeness and health’ from a systems perspective combines wisdoms from traditional healing and new physics models; from the empirical and the intuitive; from thinking and feeling. The Program honors diversity, integrating ecological, philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic, cultural and scientifi c ways of knowing. This Integrative Program differs from positivistic models in emphasizing psychology’s agency in social contexts. Conscious that the psychologist’s worldview is integral to practice, this Program expects its professionals-in-training to refi ne their values along with their skills, congruent to serving human welfare with ethical, transpersonal intent.

Kirk Schneider’s call for an activist and integrative humanistic psychology would also promulgate this same mission. In updating our integrative training, I would mention a new emphasis (in addition to teaching Wilber’s Integral Psychology). Since seeing Isacc Prilleltensky’s (1989) “Psychology and the status quo” in American Psychologist 44, we have been “doing psychology critically,” and I highly recommend the 2002 book Psychology and the Status Quo. In the introduction, Prilleltensky says:

Psychology is not, and cannot be, a neutral endeavour conducted by scientists and practitioners detached from social and political circumstances. It is a human and social endeavour. Psychologists live in specifi c social contexts. They are infl uenced by differing interests and complex power dynamics. Mainstream psychologists too often shy away from the resulting moral, social, and political implications.

FORWARD

AHP Board members at their Winter 2005 meeting voted to revise AHP’s Mission Statement to embrace the integration of personal, cultural, social, and scientifi c domains. We are in a sweep of history, of changing perceptions about consciousness, and interdependent contexts. Conjoined somehow with the Association of Transpersonal Psychology, the Association of Humanistic Psychology opportunes as the professional organization ready to enlarge its vision, and to deliver on its still-cogent promise: To serve human potential. Now, as Kirk Schneider says: “ . . . it is up to us to amplify our voice.”

DEFINITION

What is an “Integrative Psychology”? In the second cover story Don Beck describes his Spiral Dynamics, where you get to choose a color for yourself on an evolutionary line of values. I suggest that you read that article before you read further here, for a tether to your own experience. The word integrative implies a lot of stuff to be integrated. Also read Kirk J. Schneider’s thoughts on an integrative humanistic psychology on page 8(in the full paper issue).

Click to go to www.saybrook.edu

INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY

In the last paragraphs of his article, Beck moves Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamics research from the 1960s into the present with Ken Wilber’s “all-quadrant-all-levels” approach, which he calls integral psychology.

As an avid reader, you’ll recall that, in the recent April/May 2005 Perspective, the old master George Leonard (former AHP president) said: “I have followed the idea of integral ever since . . . 1970. Ken Wilber is our pal in the integral ...”

So we have both a history and a jargon that beg clarification and a story line.

INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

In the recent history of humanistic psychology’s awareness, Kirk Schneider noted in his 2002 The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology that “Humanistic psychology is an integrative psychology.” In his article here, Kirk emphasizes again that “cuttingedge humanistic psychology is an integrative psychology. . . .” Noting that neuroscientists and phenomenologists collaborate in the human enterprise, he says that—unlike some humanistic founders and leaders—we additionally recognize that personalism involves “interdependence with the socio-economic system.”

Because Kirk names 1) the personal, 2) the cultural, 3) the socioeconomic, and 4) the scientific domains, his description is “allquadrant.” With this little bit of history, I’ll try to describe this jargon in four paragraphs, or you can skip right to Beck’s main story.

WILBER’S FOUR QUADRANTS

1 subjective personal self personcentered transpersonal	4 objective brain organism scientific truth behavior neurological
2 intersubjective ethics culture worldview values action	3 interdependent socioeconomic environment social systems political

For Wilber’s model, see the four quadrants in the diagram (see also another such diagram on page 23).

1) Locate personal subjective truthfulness, creativity, intentionality, and development of Self in the upper-left. That’s where humanistic psychology’s “person-centered” psychology has been parked, at least in the public’s perception, for four decades. This quadrant also includes levels of transpersonal consciousness and spirituality, now among the most exciting domains in psychology research.

2) The lower-left quadrant is about intersubjective truth—ethics, worldview, right action. For about 15 years, I have surveyed entering cohorts training to be psychologists with the question: “Should psychologists be moral agents for social change?” Ten years ago, most wanted nothing to do with values. Recently—especially since 9/11—they are activists seeking moral agency for social/cultural/ global mind change.

3) Moving counterclockwise into the socioeconomic system that Kirk mentioned, in Wilber’s lower right quadrant we recognize interdependence with economic and political systems and environment.

4) The upper right quad is the objective organism/brain “it” self. Mid-20th-century humanists reacted to a psychology that seemed to reduce all human endeavor to this domain of science and objective truth. But this quadrant is also interdependent, more active than simple genetics and hard wiring. Research shows how meditation and biofeedback alter it. The effects of poverty and “power-over” abuse, for example, will show up in brain scans. George Leonard’s brain/body somatics refl ect also the personal, spiritual, social relationships, and environmental encounters. As Wilber (2000) says (Integral Psychology, p. 113): “Cripple one quadrant and all four tend to hemorrhage.” (Also see Richard Blasband’s article in the full paper issue on working with the biophysical in psychotherapy.)

In sum, Wilber’s quadrants provide a map for integrations necessary for the wholly human: self as consciousness, self in belief systems, in relationships, self embedded in institutions, and self as organism. My understanding is that Graves’ Spiral Dynamics research started out to describe personal values systems, and Beck has now taken it to the other quadrants. One can see how a person may operate from humanistic (green) consciousness, engage in traditionalist social interactions (blue level), and live in a modern achievement and production oriented (orange) political and economic culture.

Click to go to www.ibponline.com

QUADRANT EVOLUTION

From his prodigious reading, Wilber has summarized evolutionary lines of development in each of the quadrants, but particularly the wisdom traditions and research regarding levels of consciousness and the “archeology of the self” in the individual, subjective quadrant. Most therapeutic orientations overlook that the individual actually proceeds in multiple lines of development—cognitive, affective, moral, psychological, spiritual, and others—which might be quite separate. Add in a dozen or so subpersonalities also differently evolving (with different pathologies), and you might picture the scope of an “all-lines” awareness.

Humanistic and transpersonal psychologies arose to embrace levels and lines and (using Wilber’s term) quadrants seemingly marginalized by other orientations. As Kirk Schneider passionately proposes, the time is ripe for an “expanded psychology of humanity” with more explicit recognition of the interdependence of all systems. It’s part of the history of our field. (George Leonard as AHP president in 1979 was writing to President Carter about energy policy planning for an AHP environmental consultant in Washington.)

At my school, training in clinical psychology has been augmented by Jacob Needleman’s appearance in 1983 to talk about Scientific Knowledge and Spiritual Truth, and over the years, Fred Allen Wolf and Ram Dass chatted at a reception, Greg Cajete proposed a model of indigenous science, Starhawk’s feminist activism and Marilyn Ferguson’s mind/body visioning sold out the hall, beat poet Michael McClure chanted visionary, Hazel Henderson lectured us on economic policy. Fritrjof Capra premiered his MindWalk film to promulgate a “new physics” of interdependent systems theory. All these dimensions seemed to me necessary and congruent for psychologists to include in their thinking about human well-being.

DON EULERT, Ph.D., is Professor in the Psy.D. Program at the California School of Professional Psychology/ Alliant University. He has been Director of Humanistic Studies for 29 years.
www.Integrativepsychology.net
www.itp-life.com
www.integralworld.net
www.integralnaked.org

Second Cover Story

The Spiral Dynamics Integral: A Developmental Model of Worldviews — Don Beck