KEGAN'S SUBJECT-OBJECT THEORY

My thinking has been highly influenced by the work of Harvard educator, Robert Kegan. In over
our heads: The mental demands of modern life (1994) presents a meta-theory of the organizing
principles we bring to our thoughts, feelings, and relationships. It is a neo-Piagetian approach
where he "took the idea of such principles as mental organization and extended its 'breadth'
(beyond thinking to affective, interpersonal, and intrapersonal realms) and its length (beyond
childhood to adulthood)" (p. 29).

Subject-object theory examines the "unselfconscious development of successively more complex

principles for organizing experience" (p. 29), whereby the subjective experience transmutes into
ones objective experience. An individual evolves the ability to reflect on what previously simply
"was." The evolution of subject to object generates a new subjective experience which then must
be organized.

In fact, transforming our epistemologies, liberating ourselves from that in which we were
embedded, making what was subject into object so that we can "have it" rather than "be had" by
it--this is the most powerful way I know to conceptualize the growth of the mind (p. 34).

Kegan details five principles, or subject-object evolutions, which occur from infancy through
adulthood. Each of the principles of mental organization has a logic to it, or "more properly
speaking, an 'epistemologic.' The root or 'deep structure' of any principle of mental organization
is the subject-object relationship" (p. 32).

Principles are not only developmentally related, but each contains the previous. "Each successive
principle 'goes meta' on the last; each is 'at a whole different order' of consciousness" (p. 34).

Each epistemological evolution "is a qualitatively different order of consciousness, because the
former order of consciousness is transformed from whole to part, from the very system of
knowing to an element in a new system, from subject to object" (p. 28).

"One does not simply replace the other, nor is the relation merely additive or cumulative, an
accretion of skills. Rather, the relation is transformative, qualitative, and incorporative" (p. 33).

The principles refer to the form in which organization occurs, not the content of what is
organized. Increased complexity of organization does not mean increased worth or value. Kegan
carefully distinguishes between intellectual ability and the epistemology of its organization. He
uses an analogy to illustrate this, comparing the ability to drive a car with an automatic
transmission and the ability to drive with standard stick-shift transmission. He goes on to discuss
the function of changing gears; it exists simply as an external event for the automatic driver,
whereas the standard-shift drivers are able to take responsibility for, and reflect upon the
function.

Kegan situates the epistemological principles within historical moments, from traditional to post-
modern, and suggests that most of us struggle to make the transition into functional modernism.
In discussions of parenting, partnering, work, psychotherapy, and education, he describes
epistemological transformation as the "hidden curriculum." I concur with his "belief that the
unrecognized epistemological dimension of adult life is a promising source of clues to many new
mysteries" (p. 129).
Furthermore, subject-object theory and Kegan's thinking about it are remarkably consistent with
Buddhist thought. For me, this has meant congruence across my work and Buddhism. By way of
example, the following passages address Mind, non-self, attachment, and the notion of
consciousness:

By now it should be clear that when I refer to "mind" or "mental" or "knowing" I am not
referring to thinking processes alone. I am referring to the person's meaning-constructive or
meaning-organizational capacities. I am referring to the selective, interpretive, executive,
construing capacities that psychologists have historically associated with the "ego" or the "self"
(p. 29).

It is as faithful to the self-psychology of the West as to the "wisdom literature" of the East. The
roshis and lamas speak to the growth of the mind in terms of our developing ability to relate to
what we were formerly attached to. The experiencing that our subject-object principle enables is
very close to what both East and West mean by "consciousness," and that is the way I intend the
term throughout this book (p. 34).

This section has offered a brief summary of Kegan's subject-object theory. He reveals the
simplicity and brilliance of epistemological evolution, and addresses congruence with Buddhist
thought. In addition, the individual's reorganization at a higher order is remarkably consistent
with systemic reorganization according to chaos theory.

Kegan, Robert. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

This semester I am taking a course with Robert Kegan on Adult Development. We are learning
about Kegan's "Subject-Object" theory, which says that people progress through a series of
qualitative shifts in consciousness over the life span. At each progressive "order" of
consciousness, there are new things that can be made "object" for a person, able to be reflected
upon and manipulated. One of Kegan's critical insights is that there is a qualitative shift between
adolescence and adulthood, between what he calls the 3rd and 4th orders of consciousness. In
adolescence, we are defined by our relationship to authority, by definitions of value and priority
outside of ourselves - what it means to be a "real punk," what our parents expect of us, what our
peers' pressure demands. We look to those structures to give us meaning. This can be an intensely
conflicted state, especially when we are pulled in different directions by our various relationships
to authority. Gradually, however, and in part driven by the mental demands of that conflict, we
move to a new order of what Kegan calls self-authorship. As a person becomes self-authoring,
the barometer of value begins to come from within. We "author" for ourselves a system of values
and principles that allow us to negotiate the competing roles and forces in our lives. We learn to
look within for truth. In so doing, our relationship to everyone - parents, children, peers,
colleagues, even God - change character. We do not necessarily become more separate, less
related to people, but we begin to author and guide how our relations will unfold.
Robert Kegan's "Orders of Consciousness"

My goal in this first section is to show how Robert Kegan's "subject-object" theory outlined in
his 1994 book, In Over Our Heads, provides a developmental scheme that can help us explain
the structures that underlie and shape rationality in both science and theology. 5 In an earlier
work, The Evolving Self, Kegan described the evolution of the self as it develops through a set of
stages called "evolutionary truces." These are temporary solutions "to the lifelong tension
between the yearnings for inclusion and distinctness."6 In his 1994 book, he expands his theory
to clarify the central importance of the underlying structure of the relationship between subject
and object within each stage.

Kegan speaks of five "orders of consciousness," each evolving as a more complex way of
relating the subject (or the knower) to the object (or the known). This theory grew out of his
desire to elucidate the core structural commonalties underlying the cognitive and interpersonal
characteristics of the developmental stages. For our purposes, the critical orders of consciousness
are the third, fourth, and fifth, which Kegan refers to as "traditionalism," "modernism" and
"postmodernism," respectively. (In the next section, we will propose a taxonomy of "structures of
rationality" that correspond to these three orders of consciousness). Let us review each briefly,
with reference to Chart 1.

The first thing to notice

about the chart is that the
contents of the "subject" box
are moved into the "object"
box with each new order of
consciousness. So, for
example, whereas in the
second order, one constructs
knowledge out of one's point
of view (childhood), a
person in the third order
"backs up," so to say, and
objectifies his or her own
point of view, as one among
others (typically in
adolescence). The
qualitative nature of this transformation obtains for each new underlying structure, including the
move to "postmodernism."

Kegan illustrates the difference between the third and fourth orders of consciousness by
describing a couple who are struggling with the issue of interpersonal intimacy in their marriage.
He notes that if each spouse constructs the self at a different order of consciousness, each will
have a different idea of what it means to be intimate, or to be near another "self." In the fourth
order, the self becomes subject to its third order constructions "so that it no longer is its third
order constructions but has them… [now] the sharing of values and ideals and beliefs will not by
itself be experienced as the ultimate intimacy of the sharing of selves, of who we are."7

The move to the fourth order is a qualitative difference, involving more than just the inclusion of
more complex content within the same mental frame. It requires a transformation of the third
order, with its underlying cross-categorical structures, from whole to part, i.e., from subject to
object. The move to a "systemic" (fourth) order is not something that can be taught like a new
skill. It normally takes a long time for an individual to "negotiate" such a complete
transformative change. Introducing new complex ideas to a person who still constructs the
subject-object relationship in the third order will not by itself accomplish a transformation.
Rather, the person will tend to fit the newer concepts into the old order and "make the best use it
can of the new ideas on behalf of the old consciousness!"8 As we will see below, the same
phenomenon occurs when a scientist or theologian attempts to accomodate new ideas; the
underlying structure of knowing shapes the way the new concepts fit into his or her frame of
reference.

Although Kegan focuses most of his case material on helping to understand movement up to the
fourth order (which his research indicates most educated adults have not reached), he points out
that culture is quickly moving to a point of demanding the fifth order. This is his interpretation of
the emergence of "postmodernism" in various disciplines and cultural spheres. These new
demands in so many arenas of life "all require an order of consciousness that is able to
subordinate or relativize systemic knowing (the fourth order); they all require that we move
systemic knowing from subject to object."9 This final "order" is important to understand, for I
will argue that at this level a person gains a new capacity to overcome the postmodern dilemma,
without collapsing into relativism or absolutism.

To understand the fifth order more clearly, it will be helpful to take an example that is
particularly relevant to our topic: Kegan's discussion of "knowledge creation" from a fifth order
of consciousness, and its relationship to "postmodernism." The move out of the fourth order
means a relativizing of the "system" from its throne as subject, recognizing that all of its
constructions are grounded in subjectivity. It is a process of "differentiating" the self from the
fourth order of knowing. But then, asks Kegan, is post-modernism (being "beyond" the fourth
order) also about a new kind of "integration" after the "differentiation," or is the creation of
knowledge hopelessly ungrounded? Here he distinguishes between two kinds of postmodernism:
deconstructive and reconstructive. Both point to the limits of knowledge, to the
"unacknowledged ideological partiality" of every discipline and theory. For the deconstructivist
this leads to the unacceptability of any position and the devaluation of commitment. The
reconstructive approach, on the other hand, makes an "object" of the limits of our disciplines and
theories:

for the purpose of nourishing the very process of reconstructing the disciplines and theories… When we teach the
disciplines or their theories in this fashion, they become more than procedures for authorizing and validating
knowledge. They become procedures about the reconstruction of their procedures. The disciplines become
generative. They become truer to life.10

As a theory about theory-making and a stand-taking about the way we take stands, a
reconstructive approach to postmodernism will necessarily make judgments concerning theories
and stands that are not aware of the relativized mental structures that uphold them. The more
complex order of consciousness is "privileged" only because it is "closer to a position that in fact
protects us from dominating, ideological absolutes."11

In essence, the move to the fifth order of consciousness requires that one take the relationship
itself as prior to its parts: "Do we take as prior the elements of a relationship (which then enter
into relationship) or the relationship itself (which creates its elements)?"12 This primacy of
relationality in the "fifth" order of consciousness will be a key to overcoming the postmodern
dilemma through what I will call a "relationalist" structure of rationality.

Before moving on to a description of my taxonomy, it is important to emphasize that my

appropriation of Kegan's "orders of consciousness" is qualified in at least three ways. First, the
use of this model is not meant to suggest that psychology "explains" the experience of human
knowing. It describes only one factor among many (historical, physiological, spiritual, etc.).
Second, the model is not intended, even by Kegan, to be elitist. Having a numerically "higher"
order does not make a "better" person, either morally or intellectually. The taxonomy merely
describes increasing levels of complexity, which may lead to more competence in some areas.
Third, my use of Kegan's model is not an attempt to "prove" a theological point by appealing to
the authority of psychology. Rather, it is an attempt to outline a proposed correlation between
two structural aspects of human knowing.

Since this discussion has already become rather long I will pass over the work of Kohlberg and
proceed directly to that of Robert Kegan, whose neo-Piagetian “subject-object” theory currently
represents, I think, the most insightful and philosophically sophisticated articulation of
developmental thinking.

Kegan draws on Piaget and Kohlberg, as well as on neo-Freudian object relations theory and
existential and phenomenological psychology, and tries to synthesize them with reference to a
theme he thinks was strongly implied in those thinkers but not fully developed: the changing
relation between the subjective and objective poles of consciousness at the different stages of
psychological development. There is nothing to indicate that Kegan has read Jaspers on this
subject, but it is no accident he should have found this theme implicit in Piaget, since Piaget and
Jaspers were both working out some of the implications of the Kantian “Copernican revolution,”
to which the discovery of the constructive role of subjectivity in cognition was central.

Kegan considers the principle of the dynamic reciprocal relation between the subjective and
objective poles of consciousness to be the key to understanding in its full dimensions the
movement from one level of development to another. He suggests that “the underlying motion of
evolution, setting terms on what the organism constitutes as self and other, may both give rise to
the stage-like regularities in the domains they explore and describe the process of movement
from one stage to the next.”*
{*The Evolving Self, p. 74.}

This is certainly a cognitive process, as Piaget had analyzed it, but Kegan thinks it is also much
more than that: “I suggest that human development involves a succession of renegotiated
balances, or `biologics,' which come to organize the experience of the individual in qualitatively
different ways. In this sense, evolutionary activity is intrinsically cognitive, but it is no less
affective; we are this activity and we experience it” (p. 81). It is this intrinsic phenomenological
duality that leads Kegan also to try to integrate the cognitive-developmental psychology of
Piaget and Kohlberg with existential psychology. Piaget, he says, tended to look at meaning-
making descriptively, “from the outside,” as a “naturally epistemological” process of
constructing logical, systematically predictive theories to balance and rebalance subject and
object, self and other (p. 12). Existential psychology, he says, looks at meaning-making “from
the inside” as an ontologically constitutive process in which “what is at stake in preserving any
given balance is the ultimate question of whether the `self' shall continue to be” (ibid., emphasis
in original).
The emergence of a Piagetian cognitive operation constitutes a new structure in the subjective
pole of consciousness that naturally generates (“constructs”) a new structure in the objective
pole. Looked at from the existential or phenomenological point of view, what happens in this
process is a reconfiguration of “self” in relation to “other.” When the change is radical---and
movement from one stage to another can be experienced as fairly radical---it can even feel like a
death; the self one had been dissolves under the pressure of assimilation and accommodation,
and a new self begins to form---or at least one hopes a renewal is taking place to balance what is
being lost. But while one is going through the change, this may feel quite uncertain. It can be
experienced, that is, as not only a cognitive but also an existential crisis.

One might, in fact, describe Kegan's approach as a neo-Piagetian existential psychology---hence

the centrality of “meaning-making” for him: “Thus it is not that a person makes meaning,” he
says, “as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making” (p. 11).
Meaning-making is an activity, in the first instance, of interpretation of experience: it assimilates
experiential data and combines and recombines them in an effort to construct an objective view
that will adequately accommodate them. But at certain points the process can also involve a
restructuring of subjectivity itself and a movement from “what Piaget calls `decentration,' the
loss of an old center, and what we might call `recentration,' the recovery of a new center” (p. 31).
It is this latter process that constitutes psychological growth, the basic element in which is a
movement of differentiation within consciousness: “Growth always involves a process of
differentiation, of emergence from embeddedness…, thus creating out of the former subject a
new object to be taken by the new subjectivity” (p. 31).

What does this mean concretely? Kegan offers various examples. One has to do with how a
developing child may relate to its perceptions. He tells the story of two brothers looking down
from the Empire State building: “As their father reported it to me, both took one look down at
the sidewalk and exclaimed simultaneously: `Look at the people. They're tiny ants' (the younger
boy); `Look at the people. They look like tiny ants' (the older boy)” (p. 29). The younger boy was
still at the preoperational stage, at which one looks at the world through one's perceptions but
cannot reflect on them, so that if there is a change in what one sees, it can only seem a change in
the object: “For the `preoperational' child, it is never just one's perceptions that change; rather,
the world itself, as a consequence, changes” (ibid.). The older boy's “They look like tiny ants,”
says Kegan, “is as much about him looking at his perception as it is about the people.”

To put it another way, the preoperational younger brother (perhaps around four years of age) was
“embedded” in his perceptions. Prior to this, as a newborn he was embedded in something still
more basic: his reflexes, or what Piaget called the “sensori-moteur.” At this stage the child has at
most a very hazy sense of a world that could be called objective, and much of its cognitive
activity is occupied with sorting out where he or she ends and the rest of the world begins. “The
events of the first eighteen months,” says Kegan, “culminate with the creation of the object and
make evolutionary activity henceforth an activity of equilibration, of preserving or renegotiating
the balance between what is taken as subject or self and what is taken as object or other” (p. 81).
Typically, by around age two “[t]he sensorimotoric has `moved over' from subject to object, and
the new subject, the `perceptions,' has come into being. This is how our four-year-old got to be
who he is---a meaning-maker embedded in his perceptions” (p. 32). The same process of
evolving, at the same age, also creates “\thinspace`the impulse,' the construction of feelings
arising in me, which are mine as distinct from the world's” (ibid.); the child at this age is thus
embedded in perception with regard to cognition and in impulse with regard to action.
The existential dimension is easy to see when development is formulated in terms of embedding
and differentiation. What we are “embedded” in is irreducibly subjective to us, so that we
experience it as simply what we are. The child embedded in perception and impulse can
experience the thwarting of its impulses as though this were a threat to its very being. To move
from this state to one that can reflect on perceptions and impulses, not only means that
something has “moved over” from the subjective pole to the objective; it also means that a new
experience of selfhood, of what it means to be has taken shape. This can be wrenching. Kegan
even suggests that the experience of this is the source of our emotions, “the phenomenological
experience of evolving---of defending, surrendering, and reconstituting a center” (pp. 81--2).

Embedding and differentiation is also the point of connection with object relations theory, which
focuses on the affective aspect of the same process of changing relations between subject and
object that Piaget analyzed primarily in its cognitive aspects. There are some important
differences, however, between the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to object relations and the
neo-Piagetian approach that Kegan favors. One difference is that psychoanalysis emphasizes
early childhood as determinative of the affective patterns of one's entire life and interprets it as
fundamentally narcissistic, while Piaget considered each stage to have its own evolutionary
dynamism in the present and said that Freud's “primary narcissism… is really a narcissism
without Narcissus”---since at that point there is no more sense of self than there is of an other.*
{*Quoted in Kegan, Evolving Self, p. 79.}
Another difference is that, as was mentioned earlier, psychoanalysis has always interpreted the
fundamental psychological motive of the child as a wish to restore the condition of complete
satisfaction it enjoyed in its mother's womb; it looks backward even as it reaches out to form
object relations. These are therefore essentially a detour for it, a roundabout route toward the
uterine home that is the goal of its true longing. For Piaget, on the other hand, object relations are
created for their own intrinsic value; the child's goal is equilibration in the present, not a return to
the past, and the equilibration it seeks is adequacy of its cognitions to the new complexity of the
objective world it is discovering. Both Freud and Piaget thought it was dissatifaction that
prompted the infant's development, but Piaget believed, like Aristotle, that the exercise of our
capacities is itself pleasurable, and he also believed, like Lonergan and Voegelin, that we
therefore have an inherent dynamism toward the operations of interpreting, judging, and
evaluating.

In The Evolving Self (1982) Kegan discussed this dynamism as evolving through six “selves” or
stages: the incorporative, the impulsive, the imperial, the institutional, and the interindividual.
(His later book, In Over Our Heads (1994), offers a somewhat different five-level scheme, as we
will see shortly.) As stages, he designates these as 0 through 5. The numbered stages (1--5) each
involve a balance between what is subjective and what is objective in the structure of
consciousness at that point. The unnumbered incorporative stage (0) does not yet involve such a
balance, because as its name indicates, everything in its phenomenological “world” is
incorporated into its subjectivity. This is the condition described above as that of the newborn
until about eighteen months---embedded in reflexes, sensing, and moving. When these have
moved over to the side of the object, a new self, the impulsive (stage 1), takes shape in which the
subjective principle is the child's perceptions and impulses. This is Piaget's “preoperational”
child.

Kegan's stage 1 child, because it is embedded in its perceptions, is unable to hold two
perceptions together in mind, which Kegan says is what give its world its Piagetian concreteness.
Nor can it hold simultaneously two different feelings about a single thing, which is why it is
impulsive; what it wants, it wants right now. This makes it as yet incapable of forming a notion
of enduring dispositions over time.

Movement to the next stage takes place through differentiation of the impulse as something that
can be reflected on and controlled for the sake of longer term goals defined by the enduring
dispositions that now come to constitute its subjective principle. Kegan terms these “needs,”
perhaps because a child embedded in its appetites can only experience them as that; the idea of a
“desire” would require further differentiation. The “self” of this stage is called “imperial,”
because the child embedded in its “needs,” organizes its forces for their fulfillment and pursues
them with a determination that subordinates everything else. The imperial self thinks of others as
either useful or the opposite. It does not feel guilt, but only anxiety over how others will react.
Guilt would require something not yet possible at this stage, “the internalization of the other's
voice in one's very construction of self” (p. 91).

It is worth noting the link at this point to the mimetic psychological theory discussed earlier. At
stage 3 inner mimesis of the feelings and attitudes of others becomes central. As Kegan puts it,
“[i]n the interpersonal balance the feelings the self gives rise to are, a priori, shared; somebody is
in there from the beginning. The self becomes conversational. To say that the self is located in
the interpersonal matrix is to say that it embodies a plurality of voices” (pp. 95--96). No longer
does the child have to anticipate anxiously how others might react, since it is “able to bring into
itself the other half of a conversation stage 2 had always to be listening for in the external world”
(p. 97).

Stepping back from its “needs,” It is also able to experience ambivalence as it feels the
simultaneous force of different desires. In fact one might say that what makes the difference
between what I experience as a “need” and what I experience as a “desire” is precisely the
differentiation that takes place when the “need” I was embedded in becomes something I can
think about. I may still feel the same appetite, but when it becomes something I can notice and
recognize as a desire, then I am able to place it imaginatively alongside other ones I may have
and ask myself which is more important to me. At the interpersonal stage, however, this last
capability is still rather limited, since the different desires I feel are embedded in relationships
with persons, which become the psychological ground of the “realities” I share with particular
others. Here “reality” becomes the “world” shaped by one's interpersonal relations. Ambivalence
now, as Kegan puts it, is a matter of being pulled “between what I want to do as a part of this
shared reality and what I want to do as part of that shared reality” (p. 96). There is still no sense
of a self capable of standing back from both “shared realities,” because here one is simply
embedded in them.

For a person at the interpersonal stage, personal relations are not only important, they feel like a
primary need: “You are the other by whom I complete myself, the other whom I need to create
the context out of which I define and know myself and the world” (p. 100). This puts a limit on
the kind of personal relationship that is possible. “This balance is `interpersonal,'\thinspace ”
says Kegan, “but it is not `intimate,' because what might appear to be intimacy here is the self's
source rather than its aim. There is no self to share with another; instead the other is required to
bring the self into being” (p. 96--97, emphasis in original). What one has here instead of intimacy
is really psychological “fusion” with the other. Genuine intimacy, which leaves each partner free
to be the person he or she is beyond the relationship, requires a level of individuation only to be
found at the later stages, after one is no longer simply embedded in the interpersonal. Here
personal relations are more a matter of mutual dragooning to fill needs that are felt but not
understood. “If one can feel manipulated by the imperial balance,” says Kegan, “one can feel
devoured by the interpersonal one” (p. 97).

Kegan calls his fourth stage “the institutional” because it constitutes the subjective structure that
leads to the construction in the objective realm of normative social systems, including the roles
one plays in various relationships and the obligations and expectations that go with them. Others
are not lost when one emerges from embeddedness in the interpersonal; rather they come to be
seen in a larger, more complex framework of relations. Here one no longer is one's relationships;
one has relationships, and one can think about how the variety of relationships people share can
be regulated for mutual benefit.

The life of the emotions, too, becomes more complex at this stage, “a matter of holding both
sides of a feeling simultaneously, where stage 3 tends to experience its ambivalences one side at
a time” (p. 101). Even more important, stage 4 is “regulative of its feelings,” just as it is of
relations in society. In fact, Kegan suggests, “social constructions are reflective of that deeper
structure which constructs the self itself as a system” (ibid.).

Stage 4 brings obvious benefits, but like each of the earlier stages, it also has limitations. A major
strength is “the person's new capacity for independence, to own herself, rather than having all the
pieces of herself owned by various shared contexts…” (ibid.). This is because she is longer
simply embedded in her relationships with others. The limitation at stage 4, however, comes
from being embedded in the institutions one constructs: “The `self' is identified with the
organization it is trying to run smoothly; it is this organization” (ibid.). The pressing question,
therefore, is no longer, as at stage 3, “Do you still like me?” but, “Does my government still
stand?” (p. 102).

At some point, just as the self of stage 3 could come to feel burdened by the cost of maintaining
such consuming relationships, a person at stage 4 may come to feel the captive of his
institutional arrangements and burdened by the cost of upholding them or of living up to the
standards and roles they demand.

The mimetic factor here also seems both to offer rewards and to impose costs: Kegan says that
his stage 4 is inherently ideological (p. 102); its truths are truths for a group, and its sense of the
rightness of its roles and its performance in them depends on recognition from a class of others
that share its commitments. From the point of view of mimetic theory, the mimetic factor in this
would be the internalized eyes and voices of others whose approval or disapproval we feel within
ourselves. This can feel sustaining while the institutional balance is stable and the objective
arrangements that give social expression to it are working well, but if things begin to go wrong
under the system's administration or when one begins to wonder if there is more to life than the
system makes room for, one can experience frustration (if the problem seems the recalcitrance of
the social material), doubt (if one begins to wonder about the adequacy of the system), or self-
hatred (if one blames oneself for its failure). This prepares one for the next transition.

Stage 5, which Kegan calls “interindividual,” brings an inner separation of the self from its
institutions, thus producing the “individual,” which Kegan defines as “that self who can reflect
upon, or take as object, the regulations and purposes of a psychic administration which formerly
was the subject of one's attentions” (p. 103). Now “there is a self who runs the organization,
where before there was a self who was the organization” (ibid.).
In terms of the differentiation of consciousness, this constitutes “the evolution of a reduced
subject and a greater object for the subject to take, an evolution of lesser subjectivity and greater
objectivity” (p. 294). Subjectivity, that is, comes to comprise less and less as it becomes
disembedded from psychic material that moves over to become new content in an expanded
objective pole. Perhaps one might also say that in this process the subjective pole of
consciousness, the seat of our psychic and spiritual activity, becomes not only “reduced” but also
intensified as we become capable of more actively and consciously performing the acts that
constitute us as experiencers, interpreters, knowers, deciders, and ultimately ethical agents.

To experience one's own emergence in this way, as what Kierkegaard called “an existing
individual,” brings with it the recognition that others are capable of that too, and to value it in
oneself implies valuing it in them as well. Respect for the other as an individual, or as capable of
becoming one, is the ground of the interindividual mode of relating to others. The interpersonal
(stage 3) gravitated toward “a fused commingling” with the other; the commingling in the
interindividual stage, in contrast, is one that values and supports distinct identities. What about
intimacy at this stage? Kegan believes it is only here that intimacy in the proper sense really
becomes possible, because here the individual subjectivity of the other can be recognized and
cherished.

With this fifth stage we come to the end of Kegan's stage theory as presented in The Evolving
Self. His next book, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, presupposes the
processes of development described above and continues the analysis of the implications of his
“subject-object theory,” but it does so in terms of a somewhat different schema made up of what
he no longer calls “stages” but “orders of consciousness.” This represents a further working out
of the implications of the subject-object differentiations described in The Evolving Self. An
“order of consciousness” is a total psychological structure constituted by such a differentiation.
The first two of the orders correspond closely to the first two of the earlier book's stages, the
impulsive and the imperial, only here they are not even named, perhaps because In Over Our
Heads focuses on the last three almost exclusively. Here he says he is interested primarily in
adult development as “a vast evolutionary expanse encompassing a variety of capacities of
mind” (p. 5).

To summarize the early orders briefly, the first is the consciousness of a child who sees
everything strictly in terms of his or her own immediate needs and feelings. It is embedded in
perceptions and impulses, and its objects are movements and sensations. The second order of
consciousness is that of a maturing self that becomes capable of realizing there are other people
with points of view and feelings of their own but which still understands these only in very
concrete terms, that is, in terms of what the other must want and how that agrees or conflicts with
what the self wants. The underlying structure is the durable category, a pattern of mental
organization that comprehends elemental properties and relates them to one another as a group.
The same capacity that makes it possible for a child in a Piagetian experiment to understand that
liquid poured from a short fat container into a tall thin one retains the same quantity in the new
container also enables the child to construct his or her own point of view and grant to others their
distinct points of view.

But in the second order of consciousness a child still cannot think from both his or her own point
of view and the other person's simultaneously. This requires what Kegan calls “cross-categorical”
or “trans-categorical knowing,” which instead of subsuming only elemental properties subsumes
durable categories themselves as its members. This is the underlying structure or mental
organization characteristic of the third order of consciousness. One can see how this would make
possible the “interpersonal” mode of relating to others described above with reference to The
Evolving Self's third stage, but in In Over Our Heads the third order of consciousness comes to
include much more, even if the interpersonal mutuality made possible by trans-categorical object
construction remains its core.

The expanded conception of the third order here can be seen from the way Kegan identifies it as
“traditional.” In Over Our Heads employs as an overarching metaphor the image of culture as a
“school” with a “curriculum.” In a “traditional” curriculum the material to be learned has a
single, standard shape and is suited to the capacities of the third order of consciousness. What the
title In Over Our Heads refers to is the way we can feel when the curriculum of contemporary
culture overwhelms us by making demands that are beyond our developed mental capacity. The
third order of consciousness is what gives us the capacity to form abstract concepts, formulate
and test hypotheses, and function within a framework of roles and relationships---and this was all
we needed until fairly recently. “The great religions of traditional cultures,” says Kegan, were “a
paradigmatic example of one kind of effective culture-as-school” (p. 44). The curriculum of a
tradition is mastered by learning its contents---its roles, knowledge, skills, and ethos---and by
holding fast to them, in part with the aid of affective bonds and a network of personal loyalties.
The mental capacities required for this do not go beyond those of the third order. The underlying
psychological structure of fourth order consciousness is the ability to step back from roles,
relationships, and other now objective contents of consciousness and use them as elements in the
construction of complex systems.

Compounding our problem of being overwhelmed, contemporary culture involves not only a
“modern” curriculum demanding fourth order capacities, but also a “postmodern” one
demanding those of a fifth order. When its instructors are themselves unaware of the differences
between these and of the need to advance from one order to the next sequentially, the individual
is often beset with multiple conflicting demands, some of which he or she may not even be able
to understand.*
{*Kegan especially laments the way university faculty, tend to demand fifth order reflection on
the part of students who mostly have still not managed to make the transition from the third order
to the fourth. In Over Our Heads, p. 293.}
Even the demand for fourth order thinking can produce confusion and frustration in people who
could nevertheless function quite adequately within the framework of a traditional culture.
Kegan offers the fictional example of a successful middle manager, Peter, in a business whose
boss decides to promote him to manager of an independent operation. This gives him
responsibilities that require him to make his own plans and decisions independently. Where
before he had enjoyed working under his boss's supervision in a framework with a clearly
defined set of procedures and expectations (in other words, a tradition), now he feels burdened
and uncertain. His wife, Lynn, on the other hand, a teacher, is also given a career promotion that
makes similar demands but thrives on them even when they are difficult, because she has already
developed a fourth order mentality.

An incident in Peter's and Lynn's marriage serves to illustrate the difference between the orders
of consciousness they represent. Kegan tells a story about how they had planned on a vacation
together, just the two of them. This was important to both, since they felt they needed time alone
for their relationship. But Peter spontaneously invites his parents to join them. Lynn is extremely
annoyed and cannot understand why Peter would do this. The reason he did was that while
talking with them he felt they were a little lonely, so he thought they might like to come too. At
that moment he simply forgot what he and Lynn were looking for from the vacation; he found
himself looking for a solution to an entirely different problem. His third order consciousness was
drawn by its interpersonal orientation into thinking about the feelings of the others who were
right in front of him at that moment. Lynn, on the other hand, was concerned with something
more systematic and long term, the needs of their marital relationship.

One can see that the fourth order is, among other things, institutional, as the fourth stage was in
the earlier book. But in In Over Our Heads Kegan expands it to include the ability to take as
objects not only abstractions and mutuality and interpersonalism but also subjectivity as such and
self-consciousness, and he emphasizes self-authorship as its hallmark even more than
institutional role-regulation and multiple-role consciousness. This is for Kegan the principal
manifestation of the “modern” mentality, even if Piaget's formal operational thinking is its
structural foundation.

Kegan's fifth order of consciousness, which he speaks of as “postmodern,” emerges when a

person who has learned to think reflectively becomes aware of the restrictedness of the
institutional and ideological world views he or she constructs. Kegan describes it as “trans-
ideological” or “post-ideological” in relation to the fourth order's abstract systems or ideologies,
from which the fifth order disengages its subjectivity in order to place them over on the side of
the object. He also speaks of an awareness of paradox that characterizes the fifth order and helps
it to break out of fixation on the neat formulations of the fourth. This may, but does not
necessarily, Kegan thinks, lead to a radical suspicion of all traditions.

Like Paul Ricoeur, whose Freud and Philosophy (1970) spoke of both a hermeneutic of
suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust and recovery, Kegan makes a distinction between
“deconstructive” and “reconstructive” postmodernisms. Deconstructive postmodernism he says
is simply anti-modern; it considers reason, freedom, rights, equity, self-determination, all the
major achievements of the modern mentality, to be uncritically ideological concepts. Kegan
considers this sort of negative critique to be an early step toward moving from fourth order
toward fifth order consciousness, but he thinks it remains itself uncritically ideological, an
incomplete transition (p. 324). Reconstructive postmodernism, on the other hand, seeks to
rethink and reappropriate modern conceptions of reason and right order, though in a less
absolutistic way. Considered from this point of view deconstruction might be described as the
growing pains of transcending the fourth order; it is the differentiation that must precede the new
integration that will itself constitute the fifth order.

Since this fifth order of consciousness is a recent historical development that even those in its
vanguard are still struggling to complete, it should not be surprising that the social discourse of
postmodernism---much of which may be uttered by people who themselves have little notion of
what it is about---should take on a primarily negative, often anti-rational tone. And what it will
lead toward on the level of the general culture still remains to be seen. Kegan's own conception
of a genuine postmodernism is not at all anti-rational and embraces everything that was a source
of real strength in the fourth (“modern”) order of consciousness. “Reconstructive
postmodernism,” he says, “… reopens the possibility that some kinds of normativeness,
hierarchizing, privileging, generalizing, and universalizing are not only compatible with a
postideological view of the world, they are necessary for sustaining it,” and he appeals to those
who consider themselves postmodern to consider the possibility “that a theory such as the one I
have outlined in this book---in spite of the judgments, generalizations, and claims to universality
it makes and in spite of its unabashed privileging of `complexity'---is at least potentially an ally,
not an enemy of postmodernism” (p. 331).
Whether it is to be called postmodern or simply a further development in the differentiation of
consciousness, Kegan's conception of the fifth order is the ultimate fleshing out of the idea that
each of us remains always a combination of both differentiation and embeddedness. What seems
finally at issue in the controversy between fourth and fifth order thinking---quite apart from any
associations with temporal epochs---is the realization that subjectivity can never be reduced
entirely to objectivity, that there will always be a mysterious depth of subjectivity in
consciousness, a point of emergence in the soul from which freedom, love, and all the
potentialities of spirit can proceed and gradually unfold.

Before leaving Kegan there is one last topic in his earlier book, The Evolving Self, that is worth
mentioning because it has a special bearing on the theme of this year's Eranos conference,
“Cultures of Eros.” It is an idea Kegan adapted from the object relations theorist D. W.
Winnicott: “D. W. Winnicott was fond of saying that there is never `just an infant.' He meant that
intrinsic to the picture of infancy is a caretaker who, from the point of view of the infant, is
something more than an `other person' who relates to and assists the growth of the infant. She
provides the very context in which development takes place, and from the point of view of the
newborn she is a part of the self” (p. 115). Winnicott called this the “holding environment,” and
Kegan calls it the “culture of embeddedness.” For Winnicott it was a developmental factor that
applied only to infancy, but Kegan generalizes it to all the stages of life: “In my view it is an idea
intrinsic to evolution. There is not one holding environment early in life, but a succession of
holding environments, a life history of cultures of embeddedness. They are the psychosocial
environments which hold us (with which we are fused) and which let go of us (from which we
differentiate)” (p. 116).

Each of us, at any point in development, is a combination of both differentiation and

embeddedness. We are never simply individuals; the individual is only that side of a person that
has become differentiated. But there is always that in which the person is also embedded, and
this too is a component of the total personality. The importance of the culture of embeddedness is
that, at least under the best circumstances, it (1) nurtures the developing person to the point that
further development becomes possible, (2) encourages transition to the next stage, and then (3)
encourages reintegration, in an appropriate new form, of what has been transcended.