Robert Kegan (born August 24, 1946) is an American developmental psychologist. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development and organization development.
He was the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He taught there for forty years until his retirement in 2016. He was also Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the co-director for the Change Leadership Group.
Education and early career Born in Minnesota, Kegan attended Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude in 1968. He described the civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War as formative experiences during his college years. He took his "collection of interests in learning from a psychological and literary and philosophical point of view" to Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1977.
The Evolving Self In his book The Evolving Self (1982), Kegan explored human life problems from the perspective of a single process which he called meaning-making, the activity of making sense of experience through discovering and resolving problems. As he wrote, "Thus it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making." The purpose of the book is primarily to give professional helpers (such as counselors, psychotherapists, and coaches) a broad, developmental framework for empathizing with their clients' different ways of making sense of their problems.;
Kegan described meaning-making as a lifelong activity that begins in early infancy and can evolve in complexity through a series of "evolutionary truces" (or "evolutionary balances") that establish a balance between self and other (in psychological terms), or subject and object (in philosophical terms), or organism and environment (in biological terms). Each evolutionary truce is both an achievement of and a constraint on meaning-making, possessing both strengths and limitations. Each subsequent evolutionary truce is a new, more refined, solution to the lifelong tension between how people are connected, attached, and included (integrated with other people and the world), and how people are distinct, independent, and autonomous (differentiated from other people and the rest of the world).
Kegan adapted Donald Winnicott's idea of the holding environment and proposed that the evolution of meaning-making is a life history of holding environments, or cultures of embeddedness. Kegan described cultures of embeddedness in terms of three processes: confirmation (holding on), contradiction (letting go), and continuity (staying put for reintegration).
For Kegan, "the person is more than an individual"; developmental psychology studies the evolution of cultures of embeddedness, not the study of isolated individuals. He wrote, "One of the most powerful features of this psychology, in fact, is its capacity to liberate psychological theory from the study of the decontextualized individual. Constructive-developmental psychology reconceives the whole question of the relationship between the individual and the social by reminding that the distinction is not absolute, that development is intrinsically about the continual settling and resettling of this very distinction."
Kegan argued that some of the psychological distress that people experience (including some depression and anxiety) are a result of the "natural emergencies" that occur when "the terms of our evolutionary truce must be renegotiated" and a new, more refined, culture of embeddedness must emerge.
The Evolving Self attempted a theoretical integration of three different intellectual traditions in psychology.; The first is the humanistic and existential-phenomenological tradition (which includes Martin Buber, Prescott Lecky, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Ludwig Binswanger, Andras Angyal, and Carl Rogers). The second is the neo-psychoanalytic tradition (which includes Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Harry Guntrip, John Bowlby, and Heinz Kohut). The third is what Kegan calls the constructive-developmental tradition (which includes James Mark Baldwin, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, William G. Perry, and Jane Loevinger). The book is also strongly influenced by dialectical philosophy and psychology and by Carol Gilligan's psychology of women.
Kegan presented a sequence of six evolutionary balances: incorporative, impulsive, imperial, interpersonal, institutional, and interindividual. The following table is a composite of several tables in The Evolving Self that summarize these balances. The object (O) of each balance is the subject (S) of the preceding balance. Kegan uses the term subject to refer to things that people are "subject to" but not necessarily consciously aware of. He uses the term object to refer to things that people are aware of and can take control of. The process of emergence of each evolutionary balance is described in detail in the text of the book; as Kegan said, his primary interest is the ontogeny of these balances, not just their taxonomy.;
Evolutionary balance Culture of embeddedness Analogue in Piaget Analogue in Kohlberg Analogue in Loevinger Analogue in Maslow Analogue in McClelland/Murray Analogue in Erikson (0) Incorporative S: reflexes, sensing, and moving O: nothing Mothering culture. Mothering one(s) or primary caretaker(s). Sensorimotor — Pre-social Physiological survival orientation — — (1) Impulsive S: impulse and perception O: reflexes, sensing, and moving Parenting culture. Typically, the family triangle. Preoperational Punishment and obedience orientation Impulsive Physiological satisfaction orientation — Initiative vs. guilt (2) Imperial S: enduring disposition, needs, interests, wishes O: impulse and perception Role-recognizing culture. School and family as institutions of authority and role differentiation. Peer gang which requires role-taking. Concrete operational Instrumental orientation Opportunistic Safety orientation Power orientation Industry vs. inferiority (3) Interpersonal S: mutuality, interpersonal concordance O: enduring disposition, needs, interests, wishes Culture of mutuality. Mutually reciprocal one-to-one relationships. Early formal operational Interpersonal concordance orientation Conformist Love, affection, belongingness orientation Affiliation orientation (Affiliation vs. abandonment?) (4) Institutional S: personal autonomy, self-system identity O: mutuality, interpersonal concordance Culture of identity or self-authorship (in love or work). Typically: group involvement in career, admission to public arena. Full formal operational Societal orientation Conscientious Esteem and self-esteem orientation Achievement orientation Identity vs. identity diffusion (5) Interindividual S: interpenetration of systems O: personal autonomy, self-system identity Culture of intimacy (in love and work). Typically: genuine adult love relationship. (Post-formal; Dialectical?) Principled orientation Autonomous Self-actualization (Intimacy orientation?) —
The final chapter of The Evolving Self, titled "Natural Therapy", is a meditation on the philosophical and ethical fundamentals of the helping professions. Kegan argued, similarly to later theorists of asset-based community development, that professional helpers should base their practice on people's existing strengths and "natural" capabilities. The careful practice of "unnatural" (self-conscious) professional intervention may be important and valuable, said Kegan; nevertheless "rather than being the panacea for modern maladies, it is actually a second-best means of support, and arguably a sign that the natural facilitation of development has somehow and for some reason broken down". Helping professionals need a way of evaluating the quality of people's evolving cultures of embeddedness to provide opportunities for problem-solving and growth, while acknowledging that the evaluators also have their own evolving cultures of embeddedness. Kegan warned that professional helpers should not delude themselves into thinking that their conceptions of health and development are unbiased by their particular circumstances or partialities. He acknowledged the importance of Thomas Szasz's suggestion that 'mental illness is a kind of myth', and he said that we need a way to address what Szasz calls "problems in living" while protecting clients as much as possible from the helping professional's partialities and limitations.
The Evolving Self has been cited favorably by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ronald A. Heifetz, Ruthellen Josselson, and George Vaillant.; ; ; Despite the book's wealth of human stories, some readers have found it difficult to read due to the density of Kegan's writing and its conceptual complexity.
In Over Our Heads Kegan's book In Over Our Heads (1994) extends his perspective on psychological development formulated in The Evolving Self. What he earlier called "evolutionary truces" of increasing subject–object complexity are now called "orders of consciousness". The book explores what happens, and how people feel, when new orders of consciousness emerge, or fail to emerge, in various domains. These domains include parenting (families), partnering (couples), working (companies), healing (psychotherapies), and learning (schools). He connects the concept of orders of consciousness with the idea of a hidden curriculum of everyday life.
Kegan repeatedly points to the suffering that can result when people are presented with challenging tasks and expectations without the necessary support to master them.For example: In addition, he now distinguishes between orders of consciousness (cognitive complexity) and styles (stylistic diversity). Theories of style describe "preferences about the way we know, rather than competencies or capacities in our knowing, as is the case with subject–object principles". The book continues the same combination of detailed storytelling and theoretical analysis found in his earlier book, but presents a "more complex bi-theoretical approach" rather than the single subject–object theory he presented in The Evolving Self.
In the last chapter, "On Being Good Company for the Wrong Journey", Kegan warns that it is easy to misconceive the nature of the mental transformations that a person needs or seeks to make. Regardless of the virtues of higher orders of consciousness, we cannot be expected to master them if we are not ready or lack the necessary support, and we are unlikely to be helped by someone who wrongly assumes that we are operating at a certain order of consciousness. He ends with an epilogue on the value of passionate engagement and the creative unpredictability of human lives.
In Over Our Heads has been cited favorably by Morton Deutsch, John Heron, David A. Kolb, and Jack Mezirow.; ; ;
How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work and Immunity to Change
The book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work (2001), co-authored by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, jettisons the theoretical framework of Kegan's earlier books The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads and instead presents a practical method, called the immunity map, which is intended to help readers overcome an immunity to change. Immunity to change refers to the "processes of dynamic equilibrium, which, like an immune system, powerfully and mysteriously tend to keep things pretty much as they are" in people's mindsets and behavior.