To read the article by Karen Eriksen, it is attached at the bottom.
One of my favorite reads of the last year was Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self. It took a constructive developmental approach to the understanding of the “self.” Kegan blended ideas from the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jane Loevinger, Erik Erikson, and more. This has provided me a strong scaffolding that I use now for much of my thinking and writing around topic of self-narrative. It was inevitable that I share Kegan’s theory in a summarized form. To do this, I am reviewing Karen Eriksen’s excellent article entitled “The Constructive Developmental Theory of Robert Kegan.”
Here, I will primarily discuss the general theory, and only encourage the reader look further into the article to discover the richness that this theory provides and the particular stages of development. This begins with the general definition of the category of theory Kegan proposes.
“Constructive developmental theory concerns itself with regular, progressive changes in how individuals make meaning or “know” epistemologically. People are seen as “active organizers of their experience. . . In particular, Kegan indicated that the “deep structure of any principle of mental organization is the subject-object relationship.” He considered those things “object” that people could “reflect on, handle, look at, be responsible for, relate to each other, take control of, internalize, assimilate, or otherwise operate on.” He considered those things “subject” that people were “identified with, tied to, fused with, or embedded in.””
How do we distinguish what is “me” and what is “mine?” This is not an easy question. Sometimes we treat our possessions or ideas as if they were us. If someone insults your painting, you are yourself insulted. Conversely, according to Kegan, development occurs when we make what is “me,” into what is “mine.” So, an infant’s reflexes used to be “me” but soon became “mine.”
The process of development, according to Kegan, is to be embedded in a perspective, but we evolve when those things object to us, literally and figuratively. When our earlier lens of seeing the world and who we identify as object to us, becoming inadequate, they become objects that we can now reflect on. Such as when a child comes to realize that the rules of the parents are not the child’s intentions, they are forces in the world. The child realizes this when the parents object to the child’s actions.
“For instance, those operating primarily from the interpersonal stage (described more fully later) are able to make their impulses object — that is, they manage their impulses, examine them, and make decisions about them. However, these same people are subject to their relationships and roles — that is, they are in, affected by, and defined by their relationships but are unable to stand back from the relationships and roles, think carefully about them, and manage the conflicts that may emerge from having different relationships concurrently (as when work demands conflict with family needs).”
This objection is a loss of the previous ordered subjective experience. These are phases associated with loss and grief before they can feel like evolutions.
“Because the transformation always includes both the addition of new capacities and the loss of something that had previously been held very valuable to the person, stress, anxiety, depression, and a sense of being lost may be expectable experiences during some periods of the transition.”
Kegan also puts emphasis on the cultural environment which can facilitate the holding and evolution of these psychological stages. Much of this can seen in the institutions of our cultures such as the family, schooling, and work. It is no surprise that the solution according to Kegan is not easy, a reality of structuring culture. We need to both be held and forced to reach.
“People need an environment that concurrently attends to the stage from which they are transitioning and the stage to which they are transitioning.”
Here is a common example of how this can be used in counseling adolescents and young adults.
“The biggest and most unproductive mistake authorities make in response to teens or adults who have not progressed beyond the imperial balance, whether in family, school, or clinical settings, is expecting such people to function as the interpersonal adults they physically appear to be. Such expectations only result in assumptions of willful manipulations, with the attendant blaming, judgments of inadequacy, and fury directed toward the teen or imperial adult. . . Instead, the parents, teachers, and counselors of those in the imperial balance need to be holding without constraining, recognizing new abilities, and giving space for new abilities to exist and grow. Thus, to match or support people at this level, those in the holding environment give clear behavioral instructions and spell out the consequences of following or not following these instructions.”
Eriksen states a few objections to the theory. One is common to most stage theories about how the boundaries separating stages are never clear in reality. In this case, environments can elicit the same person to see through the lens of a different stage depending on the environment. I agree with this objection, but it is not damning; it is constructive. It merely suggests that we can need to expand the theory and begin to hypothesize what makes different environments conducive to different stages in the same person… A very interesting topic if you ask me.
The other objection is that whenever you form a hierarchy of morality, you usually end up subordinating groups of people. Kegan’s theory, in particular, gives a higher stage to where men tend to land, compared to women. This criticism I do not think is justified for two reasons. First is simply that, if it is an accurate conceptualization of these stages, such moral criticism in not relevant. Second, Kegan does not claim in the slightest that the men are the ones who reach tend to reach higher levels of morality. They tend to get stuck in stages 2 and 4, while women tend to get stuck at 3. This is useful information that can help both sexes mature and is not basis to justify superiority of one sex or the other (particularly because moral development does not end at stage 4).
