Growing Up and Waking Up: A Conversation With Ken Wilber About Leaving Transpersonal to Form Integral Psychology

Abstract

Although he formally departed from the transpersonal psychological community in the 1990s, Ken Wilber was, and continues to be, one of the most important and influential theoreticians in this subdiscipline of psychology. Given his indisputable prominence and substantive contributions to transpersonal psychological thought, both Harris L. Friedman and Douglas A. MacDonald met with Wilber in order to learn about his views of the field and to solicit him for suggestions on what might be done to help move transpersonal psychology forward. On November 16, 2018, Wilber, Friedman, and MacDonald met in Denver, Colorado. The 3-hour conversation that ensued was recorded and transcribed. In this article, we provide salient excerpts from this conversation, including some minor edits (in brackets) made to enhance quality of expression. The gist of Wilber’s recommendations, made early in the conversation, is that transpersonal psychology should “disband or, at the very least, come up with a different name.” What follows is a lively dialog between two transpersonal psychologists and one of the subdiscipline’s most renowned early thinkers who now disavows its worth and shares some of the reasons why he left the subdiscipline to pursue “integral” psychology.