The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Paperback)

by Robert Kegan (Author)
Key Phrases: evolutionary truce, impulsive balance, emergence from embeddedness, Golden Rule, Culture of Confirmation Contradiction Continuity, William Perry (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Kegan acknowledges a debt to Piaget, Kohlberg, and the psychoanalytic object-relations theorists. He regards his theory as a synthesis and extension of their views, resulting in a developmental theory that presents a unified conceptualization of affective, cognitive, and moral development. Individual chapters are devoted to each of six developmental stages--their growth and loss. The last chapter explores the implications of the theory for psychotherapy and for implementing growth in everyday life...The theory is elegant...There is much food for thought and many hypotheses for research in Kegan's book. If one has not appreciated the importance of meaning-making as a central concept in personality theorizing, the book might even propel one into the next stage. More likely, the reader will...obtain some important new insights. All in all I recommend the book highly.
--Seymour Epstein (Contemporary Psychology )

Kegan's great contribution is his description of the powers and difficulties entailed in each of these bases for conducting relations with self and others and his systematizing of considerations involved in changing from one basis to another...Kegan's is indeed a provocative contribution!
--Guy E. Swanson (American Journal of Education )

Replete with literary allusions and personal anecdotes, this scholarly and appealing discourse represents a fascinating appraisal of the evolution of the self, devoting particular attention to the role of environmental forces which may have crucial impact on the individual. It evaluates, compares, and contrasts the contributions of Piaget, Erikson, Freud, Kohlberg, and others in a refreshing and informative fashion. Written by a clinician, the book also proposes a thought-provoking metatheory of therapy and considers the topic of depression from an evolutionary orientation. [This work is] well articulated and comprehensive in scope.
--Lucille F. Halgin (Library Journal )

Robert Kegan has created a new perspective of personality development, focusing on the dynamics of the evolving self. The perspective integrates two universal human processes--meaning-making and social development--into a scheme that can be used to derive testable generalizations and simultaneously inform the practice of therapy. A very tall order which he fulfills admirably.
--Chris Argyris

Kegan has written a vigorous, exhilarating, and brilliant book. If it is read with the same grace and modesty and aliveness with which it is written, it could make psychotherapy more useful, psychology richer, and speculation on the nature of being human infinitely more rewarding.
--Robert L. Grossman

A landmark book...[It] proposes to integrate thought and emotion in human development and I responded to it on this double level. Breathlessly I encountered all the disparate ideas I had had about human development in the last ten years, all under one single solidly constructed theoretical roof...It is a book about meaning-making which revises one's own meaning-making in very profound ways.
--Sophie Freud Lowenstein (Review of Psychoanalytic Books )

A major contribution to the human development literature. Like Freud, Kegan's literary style matches the brilliance of his insights.
--William R. Torbert, Boston College

Product Description

The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems--the individual's effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs.

At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development.

Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (June 3, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674272315
• ISBN-13: 978-0674272316
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #153,658 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Developmental Masterpiece, October 14, 2000

By	Joshua A. Leonard (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Evolving Self is one of the best books that I have ever read. Kegan's eloquent presentation of the dynamic process of human consciousness evolution is incredible. Kegan presents the very best of developmental theory, while at the same time acknowledging and avoiding the trappings that such a perspective tends to fall into. Developmental theory can often lead to a very compartmentalized view of people, but Kegan's emphasis on the person as a meaning-making process sidesteps these tendencies. Throughout his writings, I felt an incredible empathy with the undercurrent of evolution sliding under all personality. Rather than using his model to categorize myself and those around me (as I have an unfortunate inclination to do with developmental theory) I instead found myself identifying with the universal forces that run through all human beings which express themselves in and as the developmental stages. This might perhaps seem like an unimportant semantic shift, but in actuality it discloses a monumental difference between these two stances. This is true precisely because my ability to help another is proportional to the degree to which I can identify with them and their struggles. The warmth of this genuinely empathetic approach to psychological development is refreshing and liberating.

71 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ego Development (a la Piaget) from Infancy through adulthood, July 3, 1999

By	[e-mail] "rogerotodi" (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews

A challenging comprehensive look at human development through the lense of "meaning making" which Kegan asserts is the fundamental human activity. Not interested in developing the five (six if you count the birth stage) stages so much as describing the dynamic of forming (and dissolving) the negotiated "truces" between the need for inclusion (assimilation) and the need for differentiation. On this point, Kegan includes the feminist concern that most developmental research has been done on male subjects (who tend to test out on the differentiation end of what Kegan believes is a continuum) and includes the notion of assimilation in his dynamic helix (the paperback cover drawing is enormously descriptive of the text inside). Kegan is interested in the person who is doing the meaning making and his theory has enormous applicability in the therapeutic project: we are helping a human person whose ability to make meaning of their lives is temporarily in crisis (often because of the very proces of meaning making itself). One should expect this type of crisis because meaning making by its very nature is a process in evolution: various "made meanings" contain within themselves the components of an as yet unrevealed meaning that will come about in the future. When it begins to emerge the human experience will be one of loss of meaning in the service of the new meaning that is to be made. Wonderful, reverential treatment of the subject as meaning maker. Challenging to therapists to maintain their human touch and not pathologize the client by thinking that the present crisis is regression; rather the present crisis is an instance of the attempt to make meaning. Book is difficult to read because the thought is so condensed and well worked out and because the vision of the author challenges the reader's own made meaning. Tod S. Laverty, OFM, MS. [e-mail] for further thoughts on this or author's other book In Over Our Heads (reviewed elsewhere on the web).

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you have to choose, you should select "In Over Our Heads", August 18, 2006

By	PH Bible Student (CA) - See all my reviews

I happened to read Kegan's, "In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life," prior to reading "The Evolving Self." While both books were very good, I don't think I gleaned a whole lot of additional insight from "The Evolving Self." So, if you are busy and can only afford to read one or the other of these two books by Kegan, I recommend you select "In Over Our Heads."