Integral psychology

Integral psychology is psychology that presents an all-encompassing holistic rather than an exclusivist or reductive approach. It includes both lower, ordinary, and spiritual or transcendent states of consciousness. Important writers in the field of integral psychology are Sri Aurobindo, Indra Sen, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Ken Wilber. While Sen closely follows Sri Aurobindo, Chaudhuri and Wilber each present very different theories.

Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga psychology

Integral psychology began in the 1940s, when Indra Sen, a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, established the field of Integral Psychology, based on a comparison of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yogic psychology and the psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung,^[1] although his book of the same name only appeared in 1986.^[2]

Independently of Sen, N. V. Subbannachar who looked at Social Psychology and Integral evolution from the perspective of Sri Aurobindo's psychology.^[3]

Since then a number of other books on or comparing Sri Aurobindo's integral psychology have appeared,^[4][5] as well as a comprehensive compilation of Sri Aurobindo's analysis of levels of mind.^[6]

Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology has also been presented in a scientific and evolutionary context by Don Salmon and Jan Maslow.^[7]

Haridas Chaudhuri

An original interpretation of Integral psychology was proposed in the 1970s by Haridas Chaudhuri, who grouped three principle of uniqueness, relatedness and transcendence, corresponding to the personal, interpersonal and transpersonal domains of human existence.^[8][9]

Ken Wilber

Like Sen, Ken Wilber wrote a book entitled Integral Psychology, in which he applies his integral model of consciousness to the psychological realm. This was the first book in which he embraced the Spiral Dynamics model of human development. In Integral Psychology, Wilber identifies an "integral stage of consciousness" which exhibits "...cognition of unity, holism, dynamic dialecticism, or universal integralism..."^[10]

While Wilber's debt to Sri Aurobindo (despite their very different approaches) is evident in the foreword to a book on Aurobindonian Integral psychology,^[11] Wilber began working on the manuscript of a textbook for integral psychology in 1992, tentatively titled System, Self, and Structure, but was diverted because he felt the need to provide more detail on his integral philosophy in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995). The textbook was finally published in 1999 as part of the Collected Works,^[12] and then separately in 2000.^[13]

For Wilber, Integral psychology is psychology that is inclusive or holistic rather than exclusivist or reductive. Multiple explanations of phenomena, rather than competing with each other for supremacy, are to be valued and integrated into a coherent overall view.^[14][15]

Other interpretations

Bahman Shirazi of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) has defined Integral Psychology as "a psychological system concerned with exploring and understanding the totality of the human phenomenon....(which) at its breadth, covers the entire body-mind-psyche-spirit spectrum, while at its depth...encompasses the previously explored unconscious and the conscious dimensions of the psyche, as well as the supra-conscious dimension traditionally excluded from psychological inquiry".^[16]

Brant Cortright, also of the CIIS, explains Integral Psychology as born through the synthesis of Sri Aurobindo's teachings with the findings of depth psychology. He presents Integral Psychology as a synthesis of the two major streams of depth psychology – the humanistic-existential and contemporary psychoanalytic – within an integrating east-west framework.^[17]

See also

• Integral psychology (Sri Aurobindo)

References

External links

• Integral Psychotherapy Center
• Integral psychology - Metaphors and processes of personal–integration - online copy of essay by Bahman Shirazi
• Chiron: Center for Integral Studies