Integral Psychology [Paperback]

What I question are the credentials re: "therapy." One could definitely make a case that many of the best "therapists" never get licensed at all and don't have impressive credentials. At the same time, however, it's strange to read suggestions about therapy or counseling without seeing any of the author's background in these disciplines. Was Wilber trained by therapists? Has he actually sat with clients and received supervision from therapists? Listened as a group of colleagues told him about his own countertransference issues? I don't know. Perhaps he has. I hope so. Because work on yourself isn't enough to make you knowledgeable about psychotherapy--just as meditations on the nature of horseness don't make you an expert on dressage.

Wilber does some of the homework in terms of theory, but the real grist, the give-and-take of actual case histories, actual in-session learnings, knowledge of the analytic literature, accounts of the mistakes all trainees make in session, notes on dealing with fighting couples or self-destructive families: where is it? Because without it, degree or no degree, we are scarcely in a position to write adequately about psychotherapy, let alone recommend modifications to how it is performed by seasoned practitioners who every day get their hands and hearts dirty with genuine human conflict and tragedy, illness and death.

Reading the reviews on this page, some of them remind me of a philosophy class I once took with an excellent professor. The subject matter was Sextus Empiricus, and his "fathering" of Skepticism as a formal philosophical method. What the professor mentioned to us, just before handing back our first essays, in a friendly but admonishing manner, was that it is far too easy to simply cast aspersions or find thinkers wrong; whereas it is far more productive to find what is right about what they say; and that only after you've got what they say down pat & can recount it, can you start to do an intelligent criticism of their work.

Mr. Wilber himself parses his work into four periods, sometimes revising his earlier views (such as on Romanticism). And though there is a general concern that informs what he has written - the totality of human knowledge and how we come to that knowledge and what characterizes that knowledge & perhaps most importantly what we can do with that knowledge (which therefore makes is difficult to write something that is not somewhat related to something else that is already written in Wilber’s ongoing opus) – UP FROM EDEN is not the same book as, say, INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY. And the repetition in the books simply, yes, rehashes the basic outlines of his foundational Quadrant model, which any good writer will offer, as there will always be readers who are new to him. Thus each book can be self-contained and does not require what can be a frustrating practice of buying a book that refers back to another book the reader is therefore forced to get in order to be able to make sense of the tome in her hands at the moment – a tome which could have set her back 50 dollars.

Who else out there can summarize so much, so clearly, and be good enough at writing to actually sell books, thus making his work available (can anyone really argue otherwise, agree or no with his starting-point conclusions) to all of us easily, and not have us searching for his work in obscure, disparate, academic journals? And what other philosopher is so perspicaciously tooting the horn of so many other writers, introducing them to us and contextualizing them for us?

For my buck, it is difficult to find a better analytical guide to knowledge, and his hand-holding - as he guides us through the annals of consciousness - is simply too valuable and too rare, to my eye, to cast aside as simply repetitious.

Is it a wonder at the relatively young age of Mr. Wilber that his works are, though unfinished, already collected?