The Evolving Self

Robert Kegan

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1983
• ISBN:
  9780674254831
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

PART ONE

EVOLUTIONARY TRUCES

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessed face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

–T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

ONE

The Unrecognized Genius of Jean Piaget

Some years ago I was visiting with a famous painter. He had become a renowned op artist in the heyday of that brief movement and his canvases were widely displayed. As I walked with him through his studio I admired the precision and invention that went into his pictures, which struck me largely as creative studies or explorations into the elements of painting. There seemed to me to be two kinds of paintings. One group seemed to explore the meaning and function of the line; these were all in black and white and looked like experiments into relations between kinds of line and between lines and space. The other group looked like investigations into color. These were tremendously vivid and yet almost obsessively systematic. The painter had used concentric bands of color in all of them, exploring the interesting fact that the same color looks different when the colors next to it change.

After looking at the pictures a while I mentioned my simple way of grouping them, and the artist said he thought about them similarly. I had been noticing that I was intrigued but unmoved by the paintings, and thought this had something to do with my sense that they were more like paintings about painting than expressive of something. I began thinking of paintings I loved and how alive they seemed, how they traveled beyond their canvas to something somehow true, whether natural or abstract. I was thinking about what these painters did with color and line. So that is probably why, when the artist agreed with my grouping idea, I heard myself ask him, “Have you ever thought of bringing these together in your painting—color and line?” And, since I was thinking of great masterpieces, I was astonished when he answered quite sincerely, “Actually I tried that a few times and it doesn’t work.” And of course if you come at it that way it cannot.

In the Prologue I discussed the themes of construction and development. The genius of Jean Piaget is not that he found a way to integrate these themes in his study of the psyche—as if this were what he set out to do —any more than Rembrandt’s genius was that he found a new way to integrate color and line. Yet when we look into the unrecognized genius of Jean Piaget we will discover, I think, that this is a feature of what is distinctive about his vision and that it leads to both a new biology and a new epistemology in which to ground a new psychology of the person. Much of what equipped Piaget to see so unusually will always be ineffable, but we do know that he brought together in one man a passion for both philosophy (the constructive theme) and biology (the developmental), and thus the psychology it leads to is a natural child of this distinguished marriage. It has always been up to us to draw out and elaborate the psychology implicit in Piaget’s work, for he maintained from the beginning that he was not a psychologist himself, but a “genetic epistemologist.” The strange term is itself another reflection of the themes of development and construction brought together. I doubt that Piaget knew quite what he did, and I am certain that had he set out to do it when he began studying the evolution of a mollusk or a child’s thinking, he would not have been able to accomplish it. He would have tried it a few times and found it didn’t work.

We begin the journey toward a new understanding of the development of the person with Piaget —but not because I imagine we will find such a theory full blown in Piaget’s own work, and not because I suppose that intellect or cognition is the foundation of personality. We begin here because in Piaget I believe we discover a genius who exceeded himself and found more than he was looking for.

Consider the preschool child, say a typical four-year-old. The typical four-year-old child has a host of original and (to our minds) amusingly strange views about nature. She may believe the moon follows people when they walk; and if you and she walk off in different directions it can follow both of you with no feeling on the child’s part of any contradiction. Or he may believe it is possible one day to become older than his older brother, so that he can mete out the same kind of oppression his older brother is now visiting upon him. When I was four, my family would go to drive-in movies in the summer. One of my favorite things about this was that I received a whole box of popcorn all my own —probably a device to keep me occupied, since I doubt that I understood much of what was going on in the films. I do remember that at some melancholic moment the box of popcorn would begin to look closer to being empty than to being full, and I would begin to express my unhappiness at the thought that if things kept up this way I would soon have none at all. I must have been a delightful companion. In any case, my mother always performed the most extraordinary magic trick on these occasions. She took the box from me in which all the popcorn had settled, closed the lid, and with proper incantations she shook the box up. When she handed it back, I was greatly relieved that the direction in which the quantity was moving had been reversed.

Now in three or four years, all these children, even the little dummy at the drive-in, will think differently about these matters. When my daughter was four she loved the television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and was visibly moved when he told her at the end of each program, “You are special—I like you. You are my special friend.” Now she is seven and she finds the show sappy and distasteful. “It’s for babies,” she says, stretching the point. The special intimacy, the private connection, which Mr. Rogers can make with a four-year-old, is not possible in an older child who hears these gentle testimonies and thinks, as my daughter said once with some contempt, “Y’know he’s saying that to everyone!”

One day a mother of two was at the end of her rope with her sons’ constant bickering. The current squabble was over the allocation of a dessert pastry. The mother had given two of the small squares to her ten-year-old and one to her four-year-old. She had explained to her aggrieved younger son that he had received only one because he was smaller, that when he was bigger he could have two. He was quite unappeased by this logic, as you can imagine, and he continued to bemoan his fate. The mother lost her patience, and in a fit of sarcasm she swept down on his plate with a knife, saying, “You want two pieces? Okay, I’ll give you two pieces. Here!” —whereupon she neatly cut the younger boy’s pastry in half. Immediately, all the tension went out of him; he thanked his mother sincerely, and contentedly set upon his dessert. The mother and the older son were both astonished. They looked at the boy the way you would look at something stirring in a wastebasket. Then they looked at each other; and in that moment they shared a mutually discovered insight into the reality of their son and brother, a reality quite different from their own.

A reality different from their own —what I am trying to convey in these tales is just that: that these quaint ways of seeing demonstrated by children are not random fancies, incomplete or dim perceptions of reality as we see it. Rather they are manifestations of a distinct, separate reality, with a logic, a consistency, an integrity all its own. Though we are here confining ourselves to a rather narrow degree of meaning-making —the physical construction of the world —we are seeing, all the same, a given meaning-system, a given moment in the evolution of meaning, the manifestations of a given evolutionary truce which “knows” the world.

Evolutionary truces establish a balance between subject and object. Can I be more precise and demonstrate exactly what balance would account for this strange way that children think? Consider Piaget’s most famous study. Two identically shaped glasses or beakers are filled with equal amounts of water. The child agrees that each beaker contains the same amount. The contents of one of the beakers are poured into a taller, thinner beaker (resulting in a higher water level than in the remaining beaker), and the child is asked about the relative amounts. The child usually answers that the taller, thinner beaker has more. Now anyone’s first response to such an answer is to pour the contents of the taller, thinner beaker back into the original beaker. We imagine that when the levels match once again the child will surely see that the contents of the poured beaker are equal to those of the unpoured beaker. “Yes,” the typical child may say, “they are equal—now” When the contents are poured once again into a shorter, wider beaker, they become less than the contents of the remaining beaker, and so on.

Now just what is going on here? Piaget’s experiments are brilliant (Einstein said they were so simple they could only have been thought of by a genius) because they transform an abstract notion such as “structure” or “subject-object differentiation” into something almost palpable. The child’s “error” is not something he or she is likely to catch and correct, because according to the terms of the child’s present adaptive balance—or evolutionary truce —no error is being made. The deep structure of the truce, simply put, is that the perceptions are on the side of the subject; that is, the child is subject to his perceptions in his organization of the physical world. He cannot separate himself from them; he cannot take them as an object of his attention. He is not individuated from them; he is embedded in them. They define the very structure of his attention. For the “preoperational” child, it is never just one’s perceptions that change; rather, the world itself, as a consequence, changes.

The two brothers who were bickering over the pastries could have been the same two boys who were overheard at the top of the Empire State Building. As their father reported it to me, both took one look down at the sidewalk and exclaimed simultaneously: “Look at the people. They’re tiny ants” (the younger boy); “Look at the people. They look like tiny ants” (the older boy). Whether the younger boy really thought the people had become tiny we don’t know (though that is just the kind of thing Piagetian psychologists might ask) —but remembering the little boy who suddenly got “two” pastries, and the one who got “more” popcorn, and the thousands throughout the world who have told researchers how the liquid “gets less” in a wider, flatter glass, we should not be too surprised if he thought exactly that. What we do know is that the older boy could take a perspective on his own perceptions; he said, “They look like tiny ants.” His statement is as much about him looking at his perception as it is about the people. Of course, if we really wanted to convince ourselves of the evolutionary state of this boy’s meaning-making, we would talk with him at great length and try to create a variety of opportunities for him to show us how he constructed the world, but the words sound as though they come from someone who is not embedded in his perceptions. Distinguishing between how something appears and how something is is just what one cannot do when one is subject to the perceptions.

So we have begun to see what a subject-object balance means (and that it means!). But how did our four-year-olds come to find themselves in this predicament in the first place? How did they get embedded in their perceptions? Why do they get disembedded? And what does disembedding do to the subject-object balance?

Although I have emphasized the way a four-year-old’s thinking seems strange or like a kind of constraint of mind, this is actually only half the picture. It is as true to say that a four-year-old’s thinking represents a kind of triumph or liberation over an even more subjective, or self-centered, way of thinking. A developmental perspective naturally equips one to see the present in the context both of its antecedents and potential future, so that every phenomenon gets looked at not only in terms of its limits but its strengths. The human being is not born with the meaning-making sophistication of a fouryear-old. This is accomplished only after years of continual experience and reflection with the world, a naturally scientific method (however unaware of it we may be) which is intrinsic to personality.

A preoperational child (our typical four-year-old) is unable to distinguish between how something appears to him or her and how something is; but the newborn (Piaget’s “sensorimotor” child) is unable to distinguish between itself and anything else in the world. As a newborn I live in a completely undifferentiated world, one in which nothing is on the side of the object, in which nothing is other than me, in which everything I sense is taken to be an extension of me, and where anything ceases even to be once it is out of my sight, touch, hearing. The newborn makes no distinction between inner and outer, between stimuli that come from her own body (for example, hunger) and those that come from outside (light), between your hand passing across her eyes and her own hand passing across her eyes. The interest of a child of four or five months can be recruited to a colorful object or crinkly piece of cellophane. But if the object is covered, the child acts as if it no longer exists. Somewhere around eight to ten months most children begin to act differently. They reach out with their little fingers and pull away whatever conceals the object. The object is somehow “there” in the world of the infant in a way it simply was not before.

Piaget’s studies of the first two years of life and the gradual construction of “the permanence of the object” amount to the labors which lead to the very first truce of all—the constituting of any “objective” world itself, a world independent of my experience of it. The child is gradually moving from being subject to its reflexes, movements, and sensations, to having reflexes, movements, and sensations. These become the object, and the child’s psychologic becomes a reflection on its reflexes and the sensorimotoric. It is not that the child was not a meaning-maker earlier or that it was unable to think. Indeed, it would even be fair to say that the child did its thinking by moving and sensing, that its body was its mind, its prehensile grasp a preabstracted forerunner to the grasp of apprehension. Like the evolution from an exoskeletal species to an endoskeletal one, the child is able to interiorize or internalize sensations and movements which before could only go on outside. The notion of development as a sequence of internalizations, a favorite conception of psychodynamic thinking, is quite consistent with the Piagetian concept of growth. And although it seems counterintuitive to describe internalization as a process by which something becomes less subjective, or moves from subject to object, it is just this recognition that processes of internalization are intrinsically related to the movement of adaptation which makes a Piagetian perspective so promising for a more articulated lifespan approach to basic psychodynamic categories. In fact, something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitution of reality. When the child is able to have his reflexes rather than be them, he stops thinking he causes the world to go dark when he closes his eyes.

We have begun to see not only how the subject-object balance can be spoken of as the deep structure in meaning-evolution, but also that there is something regular about the process of evolution itself. Growth always involves a process of differentiation, of emergence from embeddedness (Schachtel, 1959), thus creating out of the former subject a new object to be taken by the new subjectivity. This movement involves what Piaget calls “decentration,” the loss of an old center, and what we might call “recentration,” the recovery of a new center. What Piaget shows us in the first two...