ABSTRACT
Philosopher Ken Wilber began his career as a transpersonal psychologist (a field cofounded by Abraham Maslow in the 1960s). Wilber followed Maslow in that he was searching for a holistic psychological model that took into account not only mental sickness and disease, but the positive and even spiritual aspects of the human being in a single continuum. Wilber’s work has gone through several phases, but the most important aspect to actors is his “integral theory,” which attempts to integrate a number of different scientific disciplines, from psychology and neuroscience, to biology and evolution, and meld them with disciplines traditionally thought of as spiritual or esoteric. In order to accomplish this task, he created a model of reality that takes into account four different perspectives simultaneously (the internal/external and individual/collective), and overlaid that with a developmental framework that allows us to orient a number of seemingly disparate (and exclusive) viewpoints in relationship to one another. Using Wilber’s model as an analytic framework for actors may well prove to provide the first comprehensive description of the acting process since Stanislavsky’s work more than a century ago.
