Constructive Developmental Theory
Description
1. Brendan Graham Dempsey:
"Like Graves, (Robert) Kegan sees the individual as constructing their evolving self in a “truce” with their environment (i.e., living conditions). But if Graves’s research provides a rich treasury of empirical data on the levels, CDT provides a robust and elegant theory for how the self develops from one level to the next.
In his book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, Kegan writes: “The guiding principle of such a truce – the point that is always at issue and is renegotiated in the transition to each new balance – is what, from the point of view of the organism, is composed as ‘object’ and what is ‘subject.’ The question always is: To what extent does the organism differentiate itself from (and so relate itself to) the world?” (p. 44)
Essentially, the self is always emerging from its embedding in the world. As it gains more awareness of its self, it is able to see its own self as an object of consideration. The subject thus becomes an object to a higher-order subject. What had been immediate experience becomes mediated by reflection, and so had been the subject (i.e., the immediately experiencing self) becomes an object of awareness (i.e., a mediated reflection). Through this process, the self develops. In fact, you could even say it complexifies, since the old self becomes a part in a higher-level whole.
Summarizing the developmental literature on this complexification of the self, Kegan writes:
- “It has been called a process of decentration (Piaget, 1937), emergence from embeddedness (Schachtel, 1959), the recurring triumph over egocentrism (Elkind, 1974); it has been referred to as a process in which the whole becomes a part to a new whole (Perry, 1970); in which what was structure becomes content on behalf of a new structure (Piaget, 1968); in which what was ultimate becomes preliminary on behalf of a new ultimacy (Kegan, 1980); in which what was immediate gets mediated by a new immediacy (Kegan, 1981). All these descriptions speak to the same process, which is essentially that of adaptation, a differentiation from that which was the very subject of my personal organization and which becomes thereby the object of a new organization on behalf of a new subjectivity that coordinates it” (p. 85).
By this recurring process, the self emerges; “the whole becomes a part to a new whole; the subject differentiates the object of awareness and then integrates it into a new relationship." In this way, the self witnesses “a history of transformations, each of which is a better guarantee to the world of its distinct integrity, a history of successive emergence from it (differentiation) in order to relate to it (integration)” (p. 31). In the course of this series of transformations, it passes through distinct stages. As in Graves’s model, these stages oscillate back and forth from self-assertive to self-submissive, “a continual moving back and forth between resolving the tension slightly in favor of autonomy, at one stage, in the favor of inclusion, at the next” (p. 108).
Kegan identifies six such stages, which he calls
(0) Incorporative,
(1) Impulsive,
(2) Imperial,
(3) Interpersonal,
(4) Institutional, and
(5) Interindividual.
Like Graves, he maps these unfolding along a spiral, showing how “we revisit old issues but at a whole new level of complexity” (p. 109)."
(https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/emergentism-notes)
2. Joe Corbett: From Piaget via Kohlberg to Kegan:
"Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development remains the foundation of developmental psychology. He proposed four universal, invariant stages: sensorimotor (birth–2 years), preoperational (2–7), concrete operational (7–11), and formal operational (11+). Development occurs through the twin processes of assimilation (fitting new experiences into existing mental schemas) and accommodation (revising schemas when they no longer fit reality). Children actively construct knowledge through interaction with the physical world, much like little scientists in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions.
However Piaget’s model is deeply individualistic. While he acknowledged social factors (especially in later work), the engine of development is internal equilibration — the drive toward cognitive balance. Culture and teaching play a secondary, often facilitative role to biological structures.
Lawrence Kohlberg explicitly built upon Piaget’s framework to study moral development. Using moral dilemmas (most famously the Heinz dilemma), he identified three levels of moral reasoning, each with two stages: pre-conventional (punishment/obedience and self-interest), conventional (interpersonal conformity and law-and-order), and post-conventional (social contract and universal ethical principles).
Kohlberg’s theory is cognitive and justice-oriented. Moral development parallels cognitive development — one cannot reach higher moral stages without the corresponding cognitive capacity. Like Piaget, Kohlberg saw development as moving toward greater universality and autonomy, though he later acknowledged that very few people reach the highest post-conventional stages. His approach has been heavily criticized for gender and western cultural bias (notably by Carol Gilligan).
Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental theory represents the most sophisticated evolution of the Piagetian lineage. In The Evolving Self (1982) and In Over Our Heads (1994), Kegan proposed five “orders of consciousness” or evolutionary truces:
Order 1: Impulsive (early childhood)
Order 2: Imperial (self-interested, concrete)
Order 3: Interpersonal (mutual, approval-seeking)
Order 4: Institutional (self-authoring, ideological)
Order 5: Interindividual (self-transforming, dialectical)
Kegan’s key innovation is the subject-object shift. What is “subject” (the lens through which we see the world) at one stage becomes “object” (something we can reflect upon and control) at the next. Development involves gradually taking as object what was previously unconscious structure. Kegan integrates cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and meaning-making development into a single framework. He argues that many demands of modern life (parenting, work, citizenship) require fourth- or fifth-order consciousness that most adults have not yet achieved."
(https://holo.substack.com/p/the-development-of-mind-and-society)
More information
- Book: Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. By Adyahanzi, Brendan Graham Dempsey. Metamodern Spirituality Series, Vol. VI. [1] For more, see also: Emergentism as a Religion of Complexity