The Integral Psychograph
The Integral Psychograph
Wilber's View
The integral psychograph is Wilber's name for a specific diagnostic tool, distinct from the reference charts elsewhere on this wiki: where a chart like Chart 1 plots models — theorists' stage sequences laid side by side — a psychograph plots one actual individual, level by developmental line, to show how unevenly a real person's growth is distributed. The construction is simple to state: put the basic-structures levels on the vertical axis, run several developmental lines (Wilber's worked example uses five — cognitive, moral, interpersonal, spiritual, affective) horizontally through them, and mark where a given person's development currently sits on each line. Because the lines develop relatively independently, the resulting profile is jagged rather than a flat plateau — someone can be advanced cognitively while still early in moral or interpersonal development, and the psychograph is the tool built specifically to make that unevenness visible rather than averaging it away into one overall "level."
Wilber gives it real diagnostic weight, not just illustrative value: he treats an individual's psychograph as the right unit of analysis for spotting "stick points" — where a person's various lines have gotten stuck, dissociated, or arrested — and describes it as the best available guide for therapeutic work, since a purely level-based ("this person is at stage 5") or purely symptom-based diagnosis would miss exactly the line-by-line unevenness the psychograph is designed to surface.
One qualification worth keeping alongside the tool itself: Wilber is explicit that the vertical axis is not purely hierarchical top-to-bottom ranking — within any single level, much of what happens is heterarchical (mutually interacting, non-ranked elements), not further sub-stages, and he estimates this heterarchical material makes up "at least half" of development. The psychograph's charted lines capture the hierarchical migration between levels; they don't claim to capture everything happening within one.
In Integral Psychology
All of this can be represented as in…what I call an "integral psychograph." The levels in the Great Nest are shown on the vertical axis, and through those levels run the various lines. — Integral Psychology, ch. 2
Of the two dozen or so lines, I give five as examples: cognitive, moral, interpersonal, spiritual, and affective. — Integral Psychology, ch. 2
The full Upper-Left quadrant includes the entire spectrum of consciousness as it appears in any individual, from bodily sensations to mental ideas to soul and spirit. The integral psychograph is a graph of this quadrant. — Integral Psychology, ch. 5
In other words, an integral psychograph of the individual is the best guide in this—or any other—therapeutic endeavor. — Integral Psychology, ch. 8
See Also
- Waves and Streams — the levels/lines vocabulary the psychograph's two axes are built from
- Chart 1: Wilber Correlations — a chart of models (theorists' stage sequences), not of an individual — the contrast that motivates this page
- The Proximate Self and the Distal Self — the self whose uneven, line-by-line development the psychograph is built to visualize
