(16 reviews) Author: Robert Kegan ISBN : 9780674272316 New from $19.98 Format: PDFThe 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.
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1ST edition (June 3, 1982)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674272315
- ISBN-13: 978-0674272316
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 6 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development PDF
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 the feminist concern that most developmental research has been done on male subjects (who tend to test out on the differentiation end of what Kegan believes is a continuum) and includes the notion of assimilation in his dynamic helix (the paperback cover drawing is enormously descriptive of the text inside). Kegan is interested in the person who is doing the meaning making and his theory has enormous applicability in the therapeutic project: we are helping a human person whose ability to make meaning of their lives is temporarily in crisis (often because of the very proces of meaning making itself). One should expect this type of crisis because meaning making by its very nature is a process in evolution: various "made meanings" contain within themselves the components of an as yet unrevealed meaning that will come about in the future. When it begins to emerge the human experience will be one of loss of meaning in the service of the new meaning that is to be made. Wonderful, reverential treatment of the subject as meaning maker. Challenging to therapists to maintain their human touch and not pathologize the client by thinking that the present crisis is regression; rather the present crisis is an instance of the attempt to make meaning.
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