concepts

Stages

Other summaries

The Discerning Heart: The Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan [Book] Philip M Lewis

Ignoring genetics for the moment, most therapy modes I’m familiar with tend to frame issues as ‘wounds’ or ‘conditions.' I tend to think of these as growing out of two of the most influential psychological thinkers: Freud (psychoanalysis) and Skinner (behaviorism).

Freud basically said you’re acting in a particular way because childhood trauma left psychological wounds that need healing and modern psychotherapy more or less has continued down that path.

Skinner said your environment conditions specific responses through reward and punishment. Though there is much to disagree on between the two camps, the frameworks are essentially deterministic and backward-looking—you’re a product of what happened to you, and the work is about fixing what’s broken or reconditioning what was learned.

There is at least one other way of thinking that grew out of developmental psychology and Jean Piaget. The school I am most familiar with is Robert Kegan’s developmental theory which offers a fundamentally different frame: you’re not broken, you’re at a particular stage of meaning-making.

The way you construct reality isn’t a wound to heal, it’s simultaneously a developmental achievement compared to earlier stages and a limitation you can evolve beyond.

Kegan identifies five stages of increasingly complex meaning-making that humans are capable of.

Stage 1 is infancy where you are unable to separate your needs from others, you cannot imagine that others have different needs.

At stage 2 (childhood), you coordinate your own needs with others’ needs—you understand others have separate desires, but relationships are essentially transactional exchanges.

At stage 3 (adolescence into adulthood), you are able internalize others’ perspectives—your partner’s disappointment becomes your experience of yourself, their view of you becomes part of how you experience being you.

At stage 4 (mature adulthood if you get there, most don’t), you develop self-authored values that let you maintain deep relationships without being psychologically dependent on others’ approval.

Kagan posits that most adults never develop past the psychological sophistication of a teenager - research shows they plateau at stage 3, typically reached in late adolescence or early adulthood (~age 15-25).

This framework explains phenomena that seem mysterious otherwise. Why do some people require constant reassurance in relationships? They’re operating at stage 2, unable to internalize that someone cares about them - they need that caring demonstrated over and over in concrete ways.

Why do teenagers make obviously self-destructive decisions despite knowing the consequences? Stage 2 individuals have separate present and future interests, experienced one at a time rather than held together internally. They cannot think about their future selves in the way a Stage 3 individual can. In the moment, present interest wins.

Why do so many adults feel chronic guilt about disappointing parents or partners? They’re stage 3, embedded in shared psychological experiences, taking responsibility for how others feel about them rather than being able to feel secure in their self-authored values.

The knot in your stomach when your partner is angry—that’s being subject to shared psychological experience. You literally can’t sleep until you repair how they feel about you, because their view of you is constitutive of your experience of yourself. Moving to stage 4 means making those shared experiences “object” rather than “subject,” something you can reflect on rather than something you are.

The practical question: how do you encourage movement through stages? The authors suggest it requires both confirmation (recognizing current capability) and disconfirmation (inviting something beyond).

I think group therapy, good coaching, and deliberate work in an existing relationship can provide this.

I find this idea so helpful: different people are literally constructing different realities—not because they’re difficult or damaged, but because they’re operating from different developmental structures.

I have benefited a lot from traditional insight therapy, but, it does in my experience sometimes fall down at the point where you can understand intellectually why you do something without having the structural cognitive capacity to do anything different. You need the developmental capacity, not just the insight, and Kegan’s framework is a way to develop that.

https://substack.com/@anielsen/note/c-208109896?r=1b3ie

Kegan Stage 1, the Impulsive stage, is actually quite common as a lagging edge among adults.

It commonly appears as a person feeling like they didn’t do it (and others might disagree).

For example, “you made me so mad that I had to…”, “I didn’t want to, but…”, “I don’t know what came over me…”, “what else was I supposed to do…”.

For example, when a politician is caught in a sex scandal, they often disavow that “they were themselves”. If taken at face value, they were living from the Impulsive stage. Or, oftentimes, at criminal trials, a defendant might explain that they got so mad that they didn’t know what they were doing.

You could say that to the degree we disclaim responsibility for being at cause with respect to our actions (i.e., “Victim Stance”), and we truly feel that way (i.e., not telling a narrative for ulterior purposes), then we have regressed to Stage 1 impulsiveness.

Most adults have a center of gravity in stage 3 (“what we do”) or stage 4 (“it was the right thing to do”) but lagging edge of stage 2 (“it’s all about me”) is common enough, as is lagging edge of stage 1 (“My actions happened to me”).

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