Toward a Research Center:
A Flotilla of Shared Intelligence

Building the Field of Psychocultural Development

The work of psychocultural development extends beyond any one of our individual practices. Rather, it calls for systematic investigation, collaborative inquiry, and the training of practitioners who can facilitate these integrative spaces across diverse contexts.

I envision a research program that would explore psychocultural development along multiple complementary tracks:

• Practical research developing BBE group protocols for diverse settings and populations; training psychotherapists and other professionals to convene these groups; and creating interview protocols to make explicit the theories of change and worldviews operating in different systems.
• Cataloging historical and existing research and practice, efforts of individual practitioners and organizations, related to our psychocultural development, which has gone by many different names, including “conscious evolution” (Hubbard, 1998).
• Cataloging, exploring, and integrating theories of human evolution and theories and practices of individual development will help us identify what influences psychocultural growth.
• An exploration of ideology’s function from the perspective of the species’ development.

This research would join what I call a “flotilla” of diverse fields forming shared intelligence—bridging the macro lens of political science, history, and cultural anthropology and the micro lens of psychology and neurobiology with the meso work of groups, organizations, and communities.

The long-term vision includes training a new type of professional: the psychocultural practitioner. These facilitators would learn to convene groups responsive to both healing and justice values while resisting reduction to either therapeutic process or activist organizing. They would work in various settings including local government, neighborhood organizing, faith communities, single-issue groups, and organizations focused on celebration and meaning-making.

This is exploratory terrain. The research center remains an aspiration rather than a commitment. It is a direction for on-going inquiry that may evolve as the work itself develops.