Robert Kegan

Robert Kegan is an American developmental psychologist. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development and organization development.
He was the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He taught there for forty years until his retirement in 2016. He was also Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the co-director for the Change Leadership Group.

Education and early career

Born in Minnesota, Kegan attended Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude in 1968. He described the civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War as formative experiences during his college years. He took his "collection of interests in learning from a psychological and literary and philosophical point of view" to Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1977.

''The Evolving Self''

In his book The Evolving Self, Kegan explored human life problems from the perspective of a single process which he called meaning-making, the activity of making sense of experience through discovering and resolving problems. As he wrote, "Thus it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making." The purpose of the book is primarily to give professional helpers a broad, developmental framework for empathizing with their clients' different ways of making sense of their problems.
Kegan described meaning-making as a lifelong activity that begins in early infancy and can evolve in complexity through a series of "evolutionary truces" that establish a balance between self and other, or subject and object, or organism and environment. Each evolutionary truce is both an achievement of and a constraint on meaning-making, possessing both strengths and limitations. Each subsequent evolutionary truce is a new, more refined, solution to the lifelong tension between how people are connected, attached, and included, and how people are distinct, independent, and autonomous.
Kegan adapted Donald Winnicott's idea of the holding environment and proposed that the evolution of meaning-making is a life history of holding environments, or cultures of embeddedness. Kegan described cultures of embeddedness in terms of three processes: confirmation, contradiction, and continuity.
For Kegan, "the person is more than an individual"; developmental psychology studies the evolution of cultures of embeddedness, not the study of isolated individuals. He wrote, "One of the most powerful features of this psychology, in fact, is its capacity to liberate psychological theory from the study of the decontextualized individual. Constructive-developmental psychology reconceives the whole question of the relationship between the individual and the social by reminding that the distinction is not absolute, that development is intrinsically about the continual settling and resettling of this very distinction."
Kegan argued that some of the psychological distress that people experience are a result of the "natural emergencies" that occur when "the terms of our evolutionary truce must be renegotiated" and a new, more refined, culture of embeddedness must emerge.
The Evolving Self attempted a theoretical integration of three different intellectual traditions in psychology. The first is the humanistic and existential-phenomenological tradition. The second is the neo-psychoanalytic tradition. The third is what Kegan calls the constructive-developmental tradition. The book is also strongly influenced by dialectical philosophy and psychology and by Carol Gilligan's psychology of women.
Kegan presented a sequence of six evolutionary balances: incorporative, impulsive, imperial, interpersonal, institutional, and interindividual. The following table is a composite of several tables in The Evolving Self that summarize these balances. The object of each balance is the subject of the preceding balance. Kegan uses the term subject to refer to things that people are "subject to" but not necessarily consciously aware of. He uses the term object to refer to things that people are aware of and can take control of. The process of emergence of each evolutionary balance is described in detail in the text of the book; as Kegan said, his primary interest is the ontogeny of these balances, not just their taxonomy.

Evolutionary balance	Culture of embeddedness	Analogue in Piaget	Analogue in Kohlberg	Analogue in Loevinger	Analogue in Maslow	Analogue in McClelland/Murray	Analogue in Erikson
Incorporative S: reflexes, sensing, and moving O: nothing	Mothering culture. Mothering one or primary caretaker.	Sensorimotor	—	Pre-social	Physiological survival orientation	—	—
Impulsive S: impulse and perception O: reflexes, sensing, and moving	Parenting culture. Typically, the family triangle.	Preoperational	Punishment and obedience orientation	Impulsive	Physiological satisfaction orientation	—	Initiative vs. guilt
Imperial S: enduring disposition, needs, interests, wishes O: impulse and perception	Role-recognizing culture. School and family as institutions of authority and role differentiation. Peer gang which requires role-taking.	Concrete operational	Instrumental orientation	Opportunistic	Safety orientation	Power orientation	Industry vs. inferiority
Interpersonal S: mutuality, interpersonal concordance O: enduring disposition, needs, interests, wishes	Culture of mutuality. Mutually reciprocal one-to-one relationships.	Early formal operational	Interpersonal concordance orientation	Conformist	Love, affection, belongingness orientation	Affiliation orientation
Institutional S: personal autonomy, self-system identity O: mutuality, interpersonal concordance	Culture of identity or self-authorship. Typically: group involvement in career, admission to public arena.	Full formal operational	Societal orientation	Conscientious	Esteem and self-esteem orientation	Achievement orientation	Identity vs. identity diffusion
Interindividual S: interpenetration of systems O: personal autonomy, self-system identity	Culture of intimacy. Typically: genuine adult love relationship.		Principled orientation	Autonomous	Self-actualization		—

The final chapter of The Evolving Self, titled "Natural Therapy", is a meditation on the philosophical and ethical fundamentals of the helping professions. Kegan argued, similarly to later theorists of asset-based community development, that professional helpers should base their practice on people's existing strengths and "natural" capabilities. The careful practice of "unnatural" professional intervention may be important and valuable, said Kegan; nevertheless "rather than being the panacea for modern maladies, it is actually a second-best means of support, and arguably a sign that the natural facilitation of development has somehow and for some reason broken down". Helping professionals need a way of evaluating the quality of people's evolving cultures of embeddedness to provide opportunities for problem-solving and growth, while acknowledging that the evaluators also have their own evolving cultures of embeddedness. Kegan warned that professional helpers should not delude themselves into thinking that their conceptions of health and development are unbiased by their particular circumstances or partialities. He acknowledged the importance of Thomas Szasz's suggestion that 'mental illness is a kind of myth', and he said that we need a way to address what Szasz calls "problems in living" while protecting clients as much as possible from the helping professional's partialities and limitations.
The Evolving Self has been cited favorably by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ronald A. Heifetz, Ruthellen Josselson, and George Vaillant. Despite the book's wealth of human stories, some readers have found it difficult to read due to the density of Kegan's writing and its conceptual complexity.

''In Over Our Heads''

Kegan's book In Over Our Heads extends his perspective on psychological development formulated in The Evolving Self. What he earlier called "evolutionary truces" of increasing subject–object complexity are now called "orders of consciousness". The book explores what happens, and how people feel, when new orders of consciousness emerge, or fail to emerge, in various domains. These domains include parenting, partnering, working, healing, and learning. He connects the concept of orders of consciousness with the idea of a hidden curriculum of everyday life.
Kegan repeatedly points to the suffering that can result when people are presented with challenging tasks and expectations without the necessary support to master them. In addition, he now distinguishes between orders of consciousness and styles. Theories of style describe "preferences about the way we know, rather than competencies or capacities in our knowing, as is the case with subject–object principles". The book continues the same combination of detailed storytelling and theoretical analysis found in his earlier book, but presents a "more complex bi-theoretical approach" rather than the single subject–object theory he presented in The Evolving Self.
In the last chapter, "On Being Good Company for the Wrong Journey", Kegan warns that it is easy to misconceive the nature of the mental transformations that a person needs or seeks to make. Regardless of the virtues of higher orders of consciousness, we cannot be expected to master them if we are not ready or lack the necessary support, and we are unlikely to be helped by someone who wrongly assumes that we are operating at a certain order of consciousness. He ends with an epilogue on the value of passionate engagement and the creative unpredictability of human lives.
In Over Our Heads has been cited favorably by Morton Deutsch, John Heron, David A. Kolb, and Jack Mezirow.