The Evolving Self Quotes

“All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoning - or somehow operating without reliance upon - the form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being 'beyond good and evil,' which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil. Ethical relativism - the belief that there is no (nonarbitrary) basis for considering one thing more right than another - is, on the one hand, the father of tolerance; it stands against the condemning judgment; but it must also stand against the affirming judgment, and so is vulnerable to cynicism. Every transition involves to some extent the killing off of the old self.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“This book, in other words, is another empirically grounded speculation, another conceptual itinerary.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“If you want to understand another person in some fundamental way you must know where the person is in his or her evolution...the way in which the person is settling the issue of what is 'self' and what is 'other' essentially defines the underlying logic (or 'psychologic') of the person's meanings.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities. It is comforting for us to think that, in totalitarian societies, where troublesome people are often psychiatrically hospitalized, the indigenous mental health professionals are themselves aware that their behavior is nakedly political and actually aimed at social control rather than the health of the person. Bus what is the possibility that American mental health workers are themselves vulnerable to what amounts to the goals of adjustment couched in notions of health, and which lead to equal - and probably equally unwitting - exercises of social control?”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“All growth is costly. It involves the leaving behind of an old way of being in the world. Often it involves, at least for a time, leaving behind the others who have been identified with that old way of being. The two-year-old's 'No" is really a repudiation of his own old way of being. Seen from the point of view of his evolution, his declaration is really to his old self, which had been embedded in the world. ... To discover basic limitations in one's whole way of knowing can be by itself an anxious and difficult experience; but it is the creation of the new other in the process which makes it also a potentially shameful experience.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“What is self and what is other may be a question of the person's 'biology,' but it is equally a question of the person's 'philosophy': what is the subject-object relationship the person has become in the world?
That question suggests at least two things...First, subject-object relations become; they are not static; their study is the study of a motion. Second, subject-object relations live in the world; they are not simply abstractions, but take form in actual human relations and social contexts.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Kohlberg's stage 4 is essentially the psychological birth of ideology, which is a meaning system that is above all factional - that is, it is a truth for a group, caste, class, clan, nation, church, race, generation, gender, trade, or interest group. This ideology can be implicit and tacit, or explicit and public. It is identified, in any case, by the extent to which it makes the maintenance and protection of its own group the ultimate basis of valuing, so that 'right' is defined on behalf of the group, rather than the group being defined on behalf of the rights”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Central to Piaget's framework - and often ignored even by those who count themselves as Piagetian - is this activity, equilibration. Whether in the study of the mollusk or the human child, Piaget's principal loyalty was to the ongoing conversation between the individuating organism and the world, a process of adaptation shaped by the tension between the assimilation of new experience to the old 'grammar' and the accommodation of the old grammar to new experience. This eternal conversation is panorganic; it is central to the nature of all living things.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Piaget may 'be about' stages or cognitive development only in the way that Newton 'is about' gravity, or Columbus the West Indies, or Jefferson reconciling the claims of the individual with claims of the state, or Joyce a literary approach to consciousness. These were the 'problems' that consumed these men and they resolved them brilliantly - but so brilliantly that the resolutions become Trojan horses lying in wait to reveal what they were really about.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Depression characterized by the 'threat-to' orientation lodges itself in one side of the proposition. Doing so does not eliminate doubt, it only places it in the world. The world has become doubtful; what I doubt is my capacity to continue living in such a world. I doubt whether I can make it given how things are. I experience a kind of shrinking, or diminution of my self; but what remains clear - what I am most wanting to hold clear - is who it is that is doing the doubting, who 'I' am. As it seems to 'me,' what 'I' doubt is whether, in the face of the way the world has become, 'I' can keep myself together, my self together. From the point of view of our paradigm, that which 'I' say means: I doubt whether I can keep it together, this balance. What is being doubted, really, from our point of view, is the capacity to continue knowing, which, phenomenologically, from the view of the self, entails the capacity to continue being.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“American culture quite naturally provides these ideological supports to those it favors and elects as fellow participants in the social and psychological institutions which regulate its established arrangements. Essentially, these favored persons have been middle-class white men. A middle-class white man's evolution out of embeddedness in the interpersonal is not a moving spectacle in our culture precisely because there is no spectacle - you cannot watch it (unless you look closely at a given individual over time". It will stand out in the private relations of the person's immediate network but it does not stand out as figure on the cultural ground precisely because it is embedded in the tacit ideology of the culture. This is one reason the tacit ideology is so powerful and insidious for those it excludes: it cannot be seen; it is not held up for examination. What may be the most important consequence of the upheavals of the last fifteen years - largely through the attention these upheavals brought to the arrangements between blacks and whites (the 'civil rights' movement'), men and women (the 'women's movement'), and the government and the governed (the 'anti-war movement') is that the ideological nature of American life was made explicit. (Evolutionarily, if I were to apply my scheme to the culture at large, I should have to say the upheavals of the sixties and early seventies represented the transitional angst of the emergences out of 'institutional' embeddedness; of course, from the point of view of the old world not yet left behind, this same upheaval must look like a collapse of our basic institutions, which is just what popular analyses says.) For persons excluded from the tacit culture of ideology to make this move, it is necessary for them to construct their own ideological support which will necessarily stand out. Whether the ideology is feminism or black power or gay rights, it will have common features which serve the absolutely crucial function of supporting the evolution of meaning. It holds and recognizes the group-extensiveness of the new differentiation ('black pride,' 'I am woman') and protects against reabsorption into the old embeddedness (whether by moratoria from intimate relations with men, say, or turning to women - one's comrades - for intimate relations; or the adoption of a strident language which can be as much an effort to hold off an old self as it is an address to others).”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“The struggle of the sexes to know each other, to see each other, and to communicate deeply - a struggle which may be more a feature of adult life in the West than at any time in the past - may rest in the capacity of men and women to learn the universal language they share, an evolutionary esperanto, the dialectical context in which these two poles are joined. It may rest in their recognition that neither differentiation nor integration is prior, but that each is a part of the reality of being alive.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“A writer has to strain to make the reader recover the process in the words 'human being'; we talk about 'a being' and 'beings.' This book is about human being as an activity. It is not about the doing which a human does; it is about the doing which a human is.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Emergence from embeddedness involves a kind of repudiation, an evolutionary re-cognition that what before was me is not-me. This we see, too, on a universal basis in the first years of life. Could the 'terrible twos' with their rampant negativism and declarations of 'No!' be a communication to the old self, now gradually becoming object, more than to those exasperated parents who feel they are being defied as distinct and separate people? When the new balance becomes more secure, the infant will have less of a need to 'protest too much' and the parents will become 'others' rather than 'not-me's.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“But what can be found can also be lost. The process of differentiation, creating the possibility of integration, brings into being the lifelong theme of finding and losing, which before now could not have existed.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development