In his book
The Evolving Self (1982), 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 (such as counselors, psychotherapists, and coaches) 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" (or "evolutionary balances") that establish a balance between self and other (in
psychological terms), or subject and object (in
philosophical terms), or organism and environment (in
biological terms). 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 (
integrated with other people and the world), and how people are distinct, independent, and autonomous (
differentiated from other people and the rest of the world). 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 (holding on), contradiction (letting go), and continuity (staying put for reintegration). 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 (including some
depression and
anxiety) 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 (which includes
Martin Buber,
Prescott Lecky,
Abraham Maslow,
Rollo May,
Ludwig Binswanger,
Andras Angyal, and
Carl Rogers). 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 (O) of each balance is the
subject (S) 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. 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" (self-conscious) 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.
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==