The Evolving Self

Robert Kegan

As a toddler, in conquering the object and in filling my language with “me” and “mine,” I am expressing my sense that I am; but as a seven-year-old, in conquering the role, I am developing a sense of what I am, a self with properties that persist through time.


When she is asked if it would be fair for someone else who faced the same kind of needs to steal her check, she says, “No. That wouldn’t be fair.” As Blakeney and Blakeney say, the logic seems to be that “it is right for me to take someone’s check because I need it, and it is wrong for someone to take my check because I need it,” a position that is at least consistent if it is not reciprocal.


Terry’s parents love her, and the hospital was ready to care for her, but she was unhelped because no one could feel moved by or attracted to her. On the contrary, people found her revolting. People are moved by heroic and vulnerable expressions of dignity and integrity, and no one could see these qualities in the way Terry lived her life.


I think there are times one has to forget the ethics in order to latch onto what is going on. Ethics, they can really impair you from action...


Although Kenneth has a sense that “going with the wind” is superior to “ethical Kenneth,” he has an even stronger sense of the danger and risk of this stance, and identifies it as the cause of his hospitalization.


This is probably because my judgment often does not involve wisdom. In order to circumvent the law you really need wisdom because if you don’t, if you just do it haphazardly, you get really shafted.


I think whatever it is that is broader than law it takes all these people involved in a sort of entirety thing in which there is not a right or wrong, but there is a something.


He left because what he wanted was not here; he came back because it was to be found only here. What he wanted was beauty, and beauty, though he did not know it at the time, is in the doorway to the room. Poor fellow. He could only be outside the room or inside the room, for it was impossible to stand in the doorway. So he kept going back and forth, in and out. He got a steady rhythm going. Each time he moved either in or out of the room he felt he was getting closer to what he was searching for,


He kept going faster and faster and became more and more dizzy. Soon he could not even think, he just became more and more frightened about what was to happen to him. He left last Thursday. I am sitting here waiting for him to return. He will some day soon, I know. I hope so, ‘cause he’s a nice guy to be around.


chronologically adult are psychologically adolescent,


postbureaucratic structures for organizations


“You must, even in your very definition of yourself, transcend the tyranny of the form and the confusion of us with it.


the decision any workplace must make (designedly or unselfconsciously) is identical to that which faces a community, family, a marriage, or any long-term human context which, like it or not, becomes a culture for a person’s growth. The decision is simply this: to which is it more committed—the present evolutionary state of its constituents, or the bigger picture of the person as the process of evolution itself?


the classic Freudian identification of intimacy with mutuality of orgasm has a depressingly humorless ring to it,


The usual conclusion drawn from such research is that “it’s the therapist not the theory,” and that successful therapy is largely an ineffable matter.


When disequilibrium is weathered it can begin to lead to a new, more articulated, better organized construction of the world which differentiates and reintegrates the understanding of the prior balance.


In the 4-5 shift the feeling of an impending loss of specialness may be connected with the sense of oneself as all together or at least honored in the attempt (to be perfect, for example).


In the 3-4 shift it is more likely to be a loss of that idealized sense of oneself as all-considerate, selfless, completely charitable, or at least honored in the attempt.


While in the 2-3 shift growth amounts to a reconsideration of the ideal of oneself as uncompromisingly independent.


If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then what Terry, Diane, and Rebecca present as problems are better understood as their eyes.


We live much of our lives out of balance, when the world all by itself is sufficiently creative to command our irritable attention.


the counselor is there to be of help, not to give help;


It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities.


But second, and more important, it confuses integrity with validity. This distinction is a crucial one