Jorge N. Ferrer (born October 30, 1968) is a US-based Spanish psychologist who wrote about the applications of participatory theory to transpersonal psychology, religious studies, integral education, and sexuality and intimate relationships.
After completing the empirical part of his doctoral research in 1993, Ferrer traveled to the US to pursue another Ph.D. degree at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) under the ‘la Caixa" Foundation Fellowship Program.
Ferrer is one of the architects of second-wave transpersonalism, which stresses the pluralistic, relational, and inquiry-driven dimensions of spiritual practice and knowing with a participatory approach to religious pluralism.
[1] His participatory pedagogy is the focus of Yoshiharu Nakagawa and Yoshiko Matsuda’s Transformative Inquiry: An Integral Approach, an anthology of writings based on Ferrer’s teaching at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.
[7] In the foreword, Tarnas framed Ferrer’s participatory approach as the second conceptual stage of the paradigm shift initiated by Abraham Maslow’s and Stanislav Grof’s launching of the discipline of transpersonal psychology.
[11] In October of 2001, a month before the publication of Revisioning, Wilber suggested that Ferrer—together with figures such as Richard Rorty, Jean Baudrillard, Edward Said, and the late Wittgenstein—was responsible for the cultural confusion leading to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
[21] The cultural philosopher Jay Ogilvy suggested that Ferrer’s “new polytheism” represented not only a “spirituality that does justice to the multi‑cultural condition of a globalized world,” but also the best response to the criticisms of religion crafted by the so‑called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris.