The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

By Robert Kegan

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674272315
• ISBN13: 9780674272316
• Release Date: June 1982
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, Helpful

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...

a natural history of meaning

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...

ONE OF THE ABSOLUTE BESTS EVER

Comprehensive, Brilliant, highly Creative and introduces a vocabulary for human development that plugs into so many important theoretical and practictical domains. A year before this book came out, Ken Wibler wrote "The Atman Project" which articulates a very similiar vision from a slightly different angel.

A Developmental Masterpiece

The Evolving Self is one of the best books that I have ever read. Kegan's eloquent presentation of the dynamic process of human consciousness evolution is incredible. Kegan presents the very best of developmental theory, while at the same time acknowledging and avoiding the trappings that such a perspective tends to fall into. Developmental theory can often lead to a very compartmentalized view of people, but Kegan's emphasis...

Ego Development (a la Piaget) from Infancy through adulthood

A challenging comprehensive look at human development through the lense of "meaning making" which Kegan asserts is the fundamental human activity. Not interested in developing the five (six if you count the birth stage) stages so much as describing the dynamic of forming (and dissolving) the negotiated "truces" between the need for inclusion (assimilation) and the need for differentiation. On this point, Kegan includes...