Susan Cook-Greuter's theory of ego development
9 levels of increasing embrace (Basic outline of the theory, PDF)
http://psyc.queensu.ca/~irwinr/psyc250/Cook-Greuter.htm
Videos that cost money to access (but they're not that interesting anyway)
"Susan Cook-Greuter is a researcher from Harvard University who has studied with Robert Kegan and has been an active member of the Society for Research in Adult Development (SRAD) for several years. She has researched the ego development model of Jane Loevinger and has scored thousands of protocols using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT). She has focussed on the later stages of ego development, and has made distinctions in the data that Loevinger’s method of analysis did not reveal. "
It's basically a developmental type theory about how a person's view of self and other progresses. Apparently Cook-Greuter has been doing research since the 80s by analyzing people's use of expressions and what kind of syntax they're using.
I think it's pretty damn interesting, and also quite informing for people who are interested in type theory in general. Type theory isn't something that can just be understood from the outside but also has to be looked at in terms of internal experience, and that requires a lot of self-awareness as well acknowledgement of one's own ego defenses. It's quite a different way to go about things than to just go about quoting books about "self-empowerment" in your head...
I find the "Construct-aware" Stage 5/6 particularly interesting...
"Unlike earlier stages, Construct-aware persons are aware of the ego’s clever and vigilant
machinations at self-preservation. This is the first time in development that the ego becomes
transparent to itself."
"By turning further inward, Construct-aware persons start to see through their own
attempts at meaning making, and become aware of the profound splits and paradoxes inherent in rational thought. In many ways, they individually rediscover the Korzybski’s notion (1948) that “the map is not the territory.” The linguistic process of splitting into polar opposites and the
attending value judgments can become conscious. Good and evil, life and death, beauty and
ugliness may now appear as two sides of the same coin, as mutually necessitating and defining
each other."
In the context of this and similar boards... It seems to me that a person at Stage 5/6 can easily be seen as a complete bastard by someone at a lower stage in some instances. For example, being highly self-aware they can afford to reveal their motivations to others, even the not so flattering ones. Someone at a lower stage who prefers to stay unaware of the complete spectrum of their own motivations might react with distaste to such a disclosure, since they believe that they themselves have only "noble" intentions, or at least that any "ignoble" thought should be repressed rather than looked at and accepted as a "lower" part of the self-system.
What do you think about the theory?
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Originally Posted by kopernikus
feeling.
