by Robert Kegan
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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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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Accidentally? Yes, But My Good Fortune!, 2008-11-11
In the fall of 1981 I received a Merrill Fellowship to the Harvard Divinity School. I went expecting to take a seminar with Lawrence Kohlberg, the deservedly famous scholar who worked in the area of human development. I had even bought a book he wrote in anticipation of the experience. I found out that he was on leave and would not be at Harvard at all during the semester I was there. With great disappointment and reluctance I enrolled in a course that was recommended to me by Professor Sharon Parks.
I drug myself off (thinking I needed to be drugged!) to the suggested class. Lo and behold, the gifts of Robert Keegan were astounding. I was soon mesmerized by him and the insights that he offered to the ones in his lecture hall. The insights were, even then I think, being formulated into the manuscript that became this book.
What can I say about this book? I guarantee you will NOT be disappointed. As an American Baptist pastor I soon put the insights I gained into practice as I used what he taught me in the development of rites appropriate for the stages of growth into rites of passage of those I served in the congregation who had permitted my sabbatical leave in the first place. This was something new for American Baptists who usually recognize birth, marriage and death with ceremonies but few others. I still remember how I developed a rite for a dentist who was moving from an office poorly located to serve his patients into a new office. It was a holy experience and I shall never forget it. I remember that experience, in non-traditional language for an American Baptist, as a sacrament of meaning. It was rooted in the insights I learned from Professor Keegan! Buy and read. You just may be challenged to develop rites appropriate for your life and growth. I always have a warm memory when my pastor, T. Wyatt Watkins, presides at such a rite in the First Baptist Church of Cumberland, near my home in Indianapolis. If all this can happen to me as the result of this book then buy it, read it and experiment with your own rites!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant, Helpful, 2008-10-07
It's hard to exaggerate how good this book is. I am reading it as part of a Masters class in developmental psychology and it is simply brilliant. Whether reading it for personal awareness or insights into client problems, it provides an overview of developmenal theories, while proposing its own elegant understanding of the lifelong spiraling cycle of evolution which is life. It is worth any effort and deserves multiple readings. Buy it and its companion book How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work by Keegan and Layhe. It provides a step by step process that can be used for non work-related areas of growth as well as work-related.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Definitive book on Identity development, 2008-07-12
In this very readable text, Kegan provides descriptive, anecdotal examples of
his arguments, making his concepts easier to grasp.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
a natural history of meaning, 2007-05-31
I'd be really surprised if there were many books as brilliant as this one on the subject of human development. It not only captures its subject in its very motion, but actually manages to show what is there in common between the great variety of forms it takes on different planes: compare for instance the self-assertions of a 5 year old uncompromising "imperialist" to an adult's exercises of control at his work settings. Or the undifferentiated merger of a child with her mother to the overwhelming dependency most people experience in their interpersonal experiences at a certain period of life: what do others think of me? Kegan sees these as recurring motives, spiralling movements between inclusion and autonomy with ever-widening "horizons" for meaning-making: the same motives are played in a different key in each phase, the specifics of which are described brilliantly.
These are all necessary and very normal stages in every human's development, with their complete and coherent ways of meaning-making which are to be respected in order to understand and come to contact with each other in a meaningful and supportive way. Putting the blame of egocentrism and "manipulation" on a 5 year old would not be much better than accusing animals of not feeling guilty over having caused other animal's suffering: it would reflect a similar incapacity and lack of sensitivity to others "otherness", that is to say - his different mode of making sense of the world, with its advantages in comparison to the preceding modes and shortcomings in relation to (from the point of view of) the future ones. But in addition to this at once obviously necessary and yet often difficult capability of empathy and respect for diversity summed up by "pluralistic relativism", what I found so great about Kegan's work is that it always considers another point of no less importance: not only are the different stages of meaning-making having quite their own legitimacy - which are to be respected and supported when they emerge, but the separation from which shall be equally supported when the time is ripe - but it is actually shown to be as natural a thing to be experiencing turbulent periods when there is a shift ("decentering") from one major "cognitive-emotional" stage to another. Though difficult and threatening, it might be necessary to be a little bit "sick", "out of your mind" sometimes - if one is to move on.
The general framework is built on piagetian developmental notions with decreasing ego-centrism as the central axis, but modified considerably to build a picture that incorporates many of the object-relations concepts, among others. It's flexible, growth-oriented and open-ended as a (constructive-) developmental approach should be, it's humane and avoids pathologizing and reification of mental states, and last but not least - very well written. The author's personal experience as a consultist firmly grounds the excellent theory at all times in a wealth of examples and stories. A masterpiece of developmental psychology.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, 2007-05-14
A CLASSIC! A complex but excellent treatise by a contemporary star in developmental psychology.
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