ABSTRACT
The psychoanalyst has a clear set of ideas about the Oedipus complex, about the Id, ego and superego, and about the psychosexual stages of development. The behaviourist has a clear set of ideas about stimuli, responses, reinforcement and extinction. The cognitive therapist has a definite set of ideas about automatic thoughts and so forth. The humanistic practitioner is in a more difficult position, because there are a number of separate disciplines within it, each with its own notion of development, often not very well worked out or spelled out. In author's own work, he finds three different theories which he use at different times. The three are: primal integration theory, Mahrer's humanistic theory, and Wilber's transpersonal theory. The primal integration story is very flexible, and can deal with the mental ego, the centaur and the subtle stages very well. The Wilber story is very wide-ranging, and really covers the whole gamut in an extraordinary way.
