What’s ‘Comparative Science’ ?

As the term implies, it represents a trans-disciplinary comparison of scientific findings so as to provide a more reliable composite picture of natural phenomena. Within the academic world, people more often use the term inter-disciplinary to describe this form of activity. However, like comparative religion studies, where researchers look for commonalities of theme among different wisdom traditions, comparative science draws on information from different specialties in science that rarely share the same forms of terminology, let alone fora designed to integrate their various perspectives.

In our own case, we drew on findings in brain research to help substantiate and/or inform likely cognitive and emotional processes taking place in the mind/brain system, and then compared these with behavioral observation studies from psychology and ethology to see if they exhibited the same patterns reflective of these underlying mind/brain processes. Where we find a high degree of concordance, we assume there to be a high degree of reliability in making certain assertions. In this sense, and unlike many theories in psychology and psychiatry, the approach we took with Primal Process Theory was to build a theory that found internal consistency at various disciplinary levels of analysis and evidence. The result we feel is a theory one can feel confident in applying to both life, and in many professional settings.