ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we found the general model of Ken Wilber, and again in this chapter Figure 2.1 may be referred to. As we saw, it offers a map of psychospiritual development which is convincing, and gives us a useful way of seeing how psychology is related to spirituality. But what he has gone on to do is to relate this very specifically to psychotherapy. He first did this in a small but very important book (Wilber 1981b) which acts as an excellent introduction to his ideas about psychotherapy. But later on he went much further and gave copious details of how his model connects with the therapy world. This material seems so important and so shattering to many of the existing views on therapy that I think it is worth summarizing it and commenting on here, so that more people become aware of how exciting this work is, and how relevant it may be to the training of future psychotherapists. So this chapter is based on the three chapters by Ken Wilber which appear in the book Transformations of consciousness, edited by him with Jack Engler and Daniel Brown: ‘The spectrum of development’, ‘The spectrum of psychopathology’ and ‘Treatment modalities’. He gave another version of the idea in Chapter 8 of his more recent book Integral psychology. What these chapters outline is a set of what he calls fulcrums – that is, turning points where a developmental challenge arises for the individual, and some solution has to be found.
