Robert Kegan

Wilber's View

Kegan gets the warmest, least qualified praise of any researcher in Integral Psychology — Wilber calls him "everybody's favorite developmentalist" and includes himself in that "everybody" without reservation, a tone he doesn't extend even to Baldwin or Habermas (both of whom get real critiques alongside the praise). What Wilber credits Kegan with specifically is conceptual clarity about the mechanism of self-development, not just another stage sequence: Kegan's embedding/de-embedding language — a given wave starts out as the medium you're embedded in and unable to see, then becomes an object you can look at once you've grown past it — is effectively Wilber's own "subject of one stage becomes object of the next" formulation (see The Proximate Self and the Distal Self), and Kegan is cited by name, alongside Sri Ramana Maharshi, as one of the researchers who established that point.

In Integral Psychology

Robert Kegan…seems to be everybody's favorite developmentalist (count me in). He discusses a broad range of developmental issues with insight, exactitude, sensitivity, and care. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Kegan's approach is especially important, in my view, because he so clearly elucidates the nature of embedding (identifying) and de-embedding (transcending), which marks each major wave of self development. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

His books The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads show why a developmental approach is so important (and why Kegan is everybody's favorite son). — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

…from Sri Ramana Maharshi to Robert Kegan—during psychological development, the "I" of one stage becomes a "me" at the next. — Integral Psychology, ch. 3

See Also

• The Proximate Self and the Distal Self — Kegan's embedding/de-embedding language is essentially this page's "subject of one stage becomes object of the next" mechanism
• Clare Graves — the other major self-development researcher without a dedicated IP profile section, engaged with more indirectly
• Chart 4: Self-Related Stages — Kegan correlated against Graves and four other researchers on the fulcrum spine