In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life

by Robert Kegan

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If contemporary culture were a school, with all the tasks and expectations meted out by modern life as its curriculum, would anyone graduate? In the spirit of a sympathetic teacher, Robert Kegan guides us through this tricky curriculum, assessing the fit between its complex demands and our mental capacities, and showing what happens when we find ourselves, as we so often do, in over our heads. In this dazzling intellectual tour, he completely reintroduces us to the psychological landscape of our private and public lives.

A decade ago in The Evolving Self, Kegan presented a dynamic view of the development of human consciousness. Here he applies this widely acclaimed theory to the mental complexity of adulthood. As parents and partners, employees and bosses, citizens and leaders, we constantly confront a bewildering array of expectations, prescriptions, claims, and demands, as well as an equally confusing assortment of expert opinions that tell us what each of these roles entails. Surveying the disparate expert "literatures," which normally take no account of each other, Kegan brings them together to reveal, for the first time, what these many demands have in common. Our frequent frustration in trying to meet these complex and often conflicting claims results, he shows us, from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are unwittingly expected to understand it.

In Over Our Heads provides us entirely fresh perspectives on a number of cultural controversies-the "abstinence vs. safe sex" debate, the diversity movement, communication across genders, the meaning of postmodernism. What emerges in these pages is a theory of evolving ways of knowing that allows us to view adult development much as we view child development, as an open-ended process born of the dynamic interaction of cultural demands and emerging mental capabilities. If our culture is to be a good "school," as Kegan suggests, it must offer, along with a challenging curriculum, the guidance and support that we clearly need to master this course-a need that this lucid and richly argued book begins to meet.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

Amazing!, 2008-09-18
Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

Application to cultural expectations, 2008-09-02
This book is not only good for seeing the stages of development but also how our culture demands them of us and the elements of how we are to develop to meet those demands. excellent

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2 out of 5 stars

Kegan is in over my head..., 2008-08-16
I will begin by simply admitting that of all the books that I have read in my life, this was one of the most laborious for me to finish. The first several chapters were rather grueling, I settled into things a bit in the middle, and the end was downright painful. I am not conceited enough to think that no book should ever be written that might challenge my mind, but I am also not some sort of mental misfit.

My frustration centers around the fact that Kegan's writing was so dense. Some of his sentences were whole paragraphs long, with multiple parenthetical phrases. I realize that Kegan is an intellectual giant and works in academia, but it seems to me that his greatest weakness (and the most significant barrier that prevents his ideas from reaching a broader audience) is his inability (or refusal, whichever the case may be) to write in a more accessible style. He mentioned in his Prologue that he apparently received considerable criticism about his earlier book, "The Evolving Self," for its inaccessibility. If "In Over Our Heads" is an improvement, I shudder to think about reading its predecessor.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that Kegan doesn't have some helpful things to say. In fact, the overarching premise of the book (that modern life demands adults to process on a fourth level of consciousness, which is all too rare and leaves many people struggling to keep their heads above water) is solid and makes sense. And the anecdotes and stories that he includes are helpful in clarifying his points. But I just didn't think it was worth the effort to try to wade through his writing style. I'm sure that many social scientists have been captivated by this book, but for the general population, only the rarest of readers will find Kegan sufficiently engaging to endure this beast. I'm glad that I got through it, but I'm hard-pressed to recommend it to others.

0 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2 out of 5 stars

Too textbook for me..., 2007-02-08
I didn't even get into this book. It was written more like a textbook on how minds work than the helpful toolkit I was hoping for. This won't be staying on my list of books I want to read.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

adult education and leadership development, 2004-06-29
An unknown Harvard author recommended to me by the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine, I looked upon the book as text, at first. Sometimes the book came across with issues "already known," but many sections rapidly became transformative as the author build on what I already knew to expand it into the truly new. A thoughtful often enlightening look at the mental challenges of the "evolving self," it can produce a wildly positive paradigm shift for educators of students of all ages, and to those of us involved in employment assistance programs.

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