Psyche’s Score: Music of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and Its Orbits

Willow Pearson Trimbach

Abstract: Integral Relational listening and theorizing is presented by two images, organized into two complementary formulations – an Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and Integral Psychodynamic Orbits. A defining feature of Integral Relational listening is opening an ear for the co-emergence of four primary developmental stages (psychotic, borderline, neurotic, and postconventional) and four foundational psychological positions (autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, depressive, and transcendent) that necessarily occupy any such developmental stage. This foundational intrapsychic formulation is advanced as the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Constant conjunctions among the four primary developmental stages and the foundational psychological positions constitute Psyche’s Score, the music of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Through the example of love at the postconventional level of ego development, the interplay of all four psychological positions at this level of development is fleshed out. Then, through applying Wilber’s (2007) eight zone Integral Methodological Pluralism to this expanded view of contemporary psychoanalytic listening, these combined understandings represent and also construct a formulation of Integral Psychodynamic Orbits – the fluid image of an intrapsychically, culturally, somatically, and socially situated self-in-relation that is always in flux. A clinical example illustrates this theory at work. Through this advent of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and its Orbits, Integral Relational Psychotherapy thus recognizes, embraces, and engages a full range of being, including psyche’s most primitive modes and psyche’s ultimate transcendent modes of generating experience, across all levels of ego development and without excluding the postconventional levels.