The Future of Psychology

Hello, this is Ken Wilber, and today I want to speculate a bit about where psychology might be headed. My starting point is that psychology as it stands has a reasonably comprehensive and workable formulation already, so much of what I'll say is really about how I expect its existing areas to shift and mature. Still, I think the field remains narrow in what it chooses to look at. The single best thing that could happen to it would be an expansion of its territory, until it finally covers most of the genuinely important areas that a great many people already assume it covers.

There is, I believe, a real pull in that direction. Psychology seems to want to become wider, more embracing, more willing to take in everything that belongs to it. For that reason my sense is that tomorrow's psychology will be the one that attends to the areas conspicuously missing from today's, or barely touched on. Put differently, the psychology of the future is simply what today's psychology would already be if it were adequate to its own subject. Once those gaps and absences get filled in, what remains is just the continued progress within each of those domains. And I'm not alone in seeing it this way.

So that is my subject: a fuller, more inclusive, integral psychology. For a number of years I've been working with an integrative framework usually called integral theory, or integral metatheory. It also goes by a more specific name, AQAL (spelled A-Q-A-L), which stands for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, and all types. Those are the five dimensions that the metatheory holds every phenomenon to possess, whether we're talking about an individual atom or an entire discipline such as biology or psychology.

This framework has been brought to bear on something like sixty different disciplines, and each application has tended to yield results that clearly surpass what the discipline offered before it was integrated in this way. What I want to do here is turn the same framework on psychology itself, with the goal of an integral psychology that, among many other things, ends up weaving together the core insights of most of the major schools, schools that otherwise sit in isolation from one another.

The result is a more comprehensive and embracing picture, one far better suited to handling what people actually mean when they point to this thing we call psychology. In that sense it gives us the scaffolding for a real psychology of the future. Some of you already know this integral view well, so for you much of this will read as review, though I think you'll find a few fresh notions scattered through it. If the whole thing is new to you, follow along as you can. Either way, there are some genuinely new ideas in what follows.