Ken Wilber (Interview Archive)
The forms of psychology that grow up inside each zone carry those same distinctions. Take the two zones that both examine interior individual whole-ons. They land in the same territory, yet one studies that territory from the outside, in a detached third-person way, while the other enters it from the inside, in a first-person way that stays subjective. A Zone One example, the more inward stance, would be Vipassana or mindfulness meditation. For Zone Two, the more outward stance, think of Piaget, Kohlberg, or Gilligan. Either way, the object of study is still the interior individual whole-on, what sits in the upper left. You cannot locate any of these phenomena out in the sensory-motor or behavioral world. Their effects show up there, but the phenomena themselves do not.
The same split runs through the lower-left quadrant, the interiors of collective whole-ons, the we-space. You can approach that shared interior from within, as an intimate first-person participant trying to reach mutual understanding. The strongest version of that is hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation, and this is Zone Three: the we-dimension felt directly as an attempt at shared meaning. Or you can step back and treat the we-space as something with patterns, regularities, rules you observe from a third-person distance. That is Zone Four, and it gives you things like ethnomethodology and cultural studies.
The two psychologies that sit in this quadrant mirror those two zones as well. One leans subjective and immediately interpretive, rooted in the collective, holistic, cultural background that people share. Postmodern narrative therapy, which has become fairly popular, works this way. The other lower-left approach is more objective and tries to pull out the basic patterns, laws, or forms that these mutually understanding whole-ons tend to obey. Transactional analysis is an example of that.
Now the right-hand quadrants. The upper right, the objective exteriors of an individual whole-on, can also be met from within or from without. The familiar move, far and away the most common one, is the third-person view from the outside: look at the organism as an object, scientifically, from a distance. That is Zone Six, and it produces behaviorism, cognitive behaviorism, empiricism, and positivism. This is standard scientific materialism, the model that a lot of psychology still tries to imitate.
There is also a newer and well-regarded approach in the upper right, the autopoiesis and enactive paradigm that Maturana and Varela introduced. Here the organism gets viewed from a first-person position within, which is Zone Five. It goes by the name biological phenomenology, the view from within, and it tries to make sense of an organism's behavior by watching how the organism cognitively brings forth and enacts its own world.