Ken Wilber on Why So Many Schools of Psychology Exist
The notion that we create our own world got grabbed by a lot of new age and new paradigm thinkers and stretched way past what it can bear. "You create your own reality," they say. Psychotics do that, actually. Still, there is a kernel of something real here. Call it a Zone Five truth, an enactive truth, and the newer Zone Five approaches are where these schools pick up their starting push.
Among the recent schools of psychology, the ones reaching for scientific rigor tend to settle on what gets called constructivism within this zone. The ones leaning more humanistic go instead toward the correlative and enactive processes over in the upper left. The same split between an inside and an outside view shows up again once we shift to the lower right quadrant, where we are looking at the exteriors of the collective whole.
In that quadrant the division comes down to two major but genuinely different versions of systems theory. Kenneth Bausch, whose summary of the field is a good one, notes that there are now "two major unifying theories of present day systems theory": one built around complexity, bifurcation, and component systems; the other around autopoiesis. He treats these as precisely the objective, view-from-without stance on one side and the enactive, co-creative, autopoietic stance on the other. Those are the two we label Zone Eight and Zone Seven. Autopoiesis in this setting means autopoietic theory carried over into social systems, along the lines of the influential work by Niklas Luhmann.
Any school of psychology that borrows systems theory to model the human mind and behavior ends up landing in one of those two camps as well: within, or without. By now the value of an integral approach, something that can gather these various methods and tie them together, ought to be coming into view.
So, the larger point I said I would get to: why do all these separate schools of psychology and psychiatry keep piling up? We have just laid out eight major ones, and we never even got into the differences across levels, lines, or states. The reason looks plain enough. The universe actually holds all of these dimensions, and a given school or discipline, in psychology as much as anywhere else, usually grabs one of them, or maybe a few, a single zone or level or line or state, and then concentrates on it to the near-total exclusion of everything else.
What you get out of that is partial, fragmented, siloed. That is the thing Integral Metatheory is really trying to work past. And none of it stays inside the walls of academic psychology and psychiatry. It reaches into nearly every corner of ordinary life. Our world is coming apart at the seams in countless ways, scattered across dozens upon dozens of hyper-specializations, most of them with no clue the others are even out there, no clue what the others are doing, or what they are.