John Rowan - What is Integral Psychotherapy?

A great introduction to integral psychotherapy by John Rowan, a British psychotherapist and a well-known author (including two great books on subpersonalities). This article comes from IntegralBuddha.

This article is featured on: AQAL & SDi & Psychology
By Dr. John Rowan

In this previously unpublished paper, leading Integral/Transpersonal psychotherapist and counsellor Dr John Rowan outlines his approach to Integral psychotherapy.

He challenges therapists to reach up and include realms even beyond the 'Subtle' level, and also to include not just the left-hand quadrants, but also the right-hand, in their work.

"This integral approach seems to me to open up an exciting prospect for the future of psychotherapy", concludes John.

Dr Rowan is a founder member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute, and is a renowned pioneer in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology (and therapy). He is also the author of The Transpersonal: Spirituality in Psychotherapy and Counselling. Ken Wilber was one of the contributors to John Rowan's festschrift, along with Tom Greening, Ian Gordon-Brown, Peter Reason, Petruska Clarkson and others.

John gave a presentation 'Extensions to AQAL' based on the ideas in this paper to the London Integral Circle in February 2006.

A radically edited version of this paper appeared in Drew, J and Lorimer, D (eds.) Ways Through the Wall: Approaches to citizenship in an Interconnected World.

Here is the beginning of the article.

INTEGRAL PSYCHOTHERAPY (final draft)

John Rowan

INTRODUCTION

To write a full introduction to this essay, explaining the whole evolutionary approach of Ken Wilber, would be too lengthy and perhaps not necessary. Wilber's basic idea is quite well known by now. It can be found in all of his books. In its simplest form it says that in the process of our psychospiritual development, there are three main stages which we go through, which he labels the prepersonal, the personal and the transpersonal. The prepersonal is all that part of our development prior to the emergence of a separate self, which normally happens in or around adolescence. It is well described in all the standard literature. The personal is the main part of our development, taking place in adulthood, and culminating in the mature ego. Most of psychology, and most of other literature too, deals with this stage of development, and again there is a mass of data about it. The transpersonal is the realm beyond that, which we only reach by an intentional process, because society does not help us with it – at this point there is no escalator taking us onwards, so to speak. It is more controversial, although Maslow started writing about it fifty years ago, but Wilber's great achievement has been to describe it in full detail, and to map it with the help of writers from many countries and many centuries (Wilber 2000).

If we look at his quadrant diagram, first described in his 1995 book, and reprinted many times in his later books, we can see at once that he has taken this basic thought (which originally only applied to the upper left quadrant, the individual interior subjective, or I) and applied it to three other realms, which he describes as the lower left (the social exterior subjective, or We), the lower right (the social exterior objective, or They), and the upper right (the individual interior objective, or It). Within each of these he has a set of numbered levels.

If we think in terms of the three broad sections which we have labelled as prepersonal, personal and transpersonal, everything up to and including level 11 is prepersonal, level 12 he calls the personal, and everything including level 13 and beyond he calls the transpersonal. One of Wilber's most insistent themes is that we tend to suffer from the pre/trans fallacy - that is, we confuse what is prepersonal with what is transpersonal. Some do it (like Freud) by saying that the transpersonal does not really exist - it is just a projection from the prepersonal; others do it (like Jung) by saying that the prepersonal does not really exist - anything beyond the personal must be transpersonal.

In Figure 1, point 13 in the upper left quadrant is a particularly important level, which we shall have a good deal to say about. On the diagram, it looks as if development was linear and unified – in other words, it looks as if we go up the line in one piece. But Wilber warns that this is not so. We have to take into account that there is more than one line of development. He says: "These developmental lines include: morals, affects, self-identity, psychosexuality, cognition, ideas of the good, role taking, socioemotional capacity, creativity, altruism, several lines that might be called "spiritual" (care, openness, concern, religious faith, meditative stages), joy, communicative competence, modes of space and time, death-seizure, needs, worldviews, logico-mathematical competence, kinesthetic skills, gender identity, and empathy – to name a few of the more prominent developmental lines for which we have some empirical evidence." (Wilber 2000, p.28) And he says that development may often be uneven. Hence a great guru may be spiritually highly developed but morally suspect, for example (Anrhony et al 1987).

By integral psychotherapy I mean any kind of psychotherapy which tries to do justice to the All Quadrants All Levels approach laid down by Ken Wilber. However, it has to be said that Wilber has not said nearly enough about the higher levels in relation to the quadrant model. We need far more on this for the purposes of psychotherapy. To stop at the Centaur level (level 13) is not good enough when it comes to psychotherapy, since a great deal of interesting work by people like Jung, Assagioli, Houston, Hillman and others goes well into the Subtle (level 14), and work by people like Almaas, Epstein, Brazier, Rosenbaum and others goes also into the Causal (level 15).

So what I am trying to do in this paper is quite ambitious. Firstly there is the attempt to expand the upper left quadrant beyond what Ken Wilber has laid down in his diagram. He goes up to level 13, and I want to talk also about levels 14 and 15. Secondly there is the attempt to restrict myself to talking about psychotherapy, and in this respect there is no need to discuss the very early levels which mainly refer to the prepersonal, the developmentally immature levels of psychospiritual development. So I shall start at level 11, which is the magic/mythic level sometimes found, especially when working crossculturally. Thirdly there is the attempt to make more sense of the upper right than can be found in Ken Wilber. He says: "In the Upper–Right quadrant, as evolution moves into the human domain, I have indicated states marked by SF1, SF2, and SF3. These are the structure–functions of the human brain that correspond with concrete operational, formal operational, and vision–logic. These are currently being mapped using PET and other sophisticated instruments, and I am simply indicating the correlation, whatever it turns out to be, with these symbols. Everybody agrees that mental states and structures have some sort of correlates in brain physiology, and this is all I mean by the symbols SF1, etc. " (Wilber 1995, p.192) I want to expand this account, and also to say something about the further levels I have labelled 14 and 15.

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