Jane Loevinger
Jane Loevinger
Wilber's View
Loevinger supplies Wilber with the specifically ego-developmental leg of the "Habermas/Maslow/Loevinger parallels" he treats as convergent evidence for a single developmental logic running through very different research programs. Where Kohlberg tracks moral reasoning and Maslow tracks motivational needs, Loevinger tracks stages of ego or self-development directly — and Wilber maps her stage language (the "conformist" self giving way to a "conscientious" self) onto the same conventional-to-postconventional transition he finds in Kohlberg's moral stages and Maslow's belongingness-to-self-esteem shift. She's one of a handful of names (with Baldwin, Werner, Graves, Piaget) Wilber credits for the specific historical achievement of finally putting rigorous, research-backed empirical flesh on stage-development claims that, before the second half of the twentieth century, had been mostly speculative.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
One can't help but notice that this hierarchy of "deficiency needs" or "scarce resources" bears striking resemblance to Abraham Maslow's (and Jane Loevinger's and others') present-day ontogenetic needs hierarchy—from safety/power to conventional security/belonging to personal/egoic value to existential meaning.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5
"Who am I?" becomes, for the first time, a burning question, and the self-esteem needs emerge from the belongingness needs (Maslow), or a "conscientious" self emerges from a "conformist" mode (Loevinger).
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6
…it was only in the last half of this century that the stages of consciousness development were outlined in any sort of rigorous fashion backed by research—Baldwin, Werner, Graves, Maslow, Piaget, Loevinger, and so on.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12
