To What Will You Surrender Yourself?

Developmental psychology reaches up, the material world pushes in from all sides

There is a shocking complementarity to the contemporary field of developmental psychology and media ecology. As Kagen and Lahey put it in their 2009 airport book Immunity to Change,

A way of knowing becomes more complex when it is able to look at what before it could only look through. In other words, our way of knowing becomes more complex when we create a bigger system that incorporates and expands on our previous system.

In his 1982 book The Evolving Self—a far more literary and scholarly, if unrefined formulation of Robert Kegan’s reformulation of Piaget—we find the same concept strung-up within a formal lattice of explicit life-stages.

All Kagen is saying is that, as you grow up, you become more aware of the younger self that you were. The implication is that self-awareness is always looking backward, a rear-view mirror affair. And, if you are to continue to develop as a person, what you don’t know about yourself right now will only be made clear to you in a coming future maturity.

This is what self-awareness looks like after psychoanalysis—always retrospective, looking backward. Like rings on a tree, each developing ring of the self contains the old self as content.

Read it again. “A way of knowing becomes more complex when it is able to look at what before it could only look through.” A young child is their impulses, an older child has impulses to control or release. The younger child perceives the world, the older child has a perception which he or she knows may or may not be correct.

One joke in Marshall McLuhan’s ample repertory had a young child taking his first flight on an airplane asking, “Daddy, when do start getting smaller?”

Jean Piaget describes this directness of perception as a “pre-operational stage” of development before the “concrete stage.” That is, the outside world is not yet concrete in-and-of-itself outside the child’s perception yet. In complementary terms, Kagen would say, the child doesn’t see himself as having a perception. The child is, without self-consciously, a perceiver. The older, concrete child has his perceptions as an object, the younger pre-operational child is subject to his perceptions directly and without self-awareness.

In his 1982 book, Kagen takes this logic from Piaget’s realm of childhood into adult-hood. Some adults are the beliefs of their social group—they are as-we-say-today socially constructed. Others remember the time that they were socially constructed, but live now by the principles of an ideology which allow them to dissent from the group. And beyond that, Kagen suggests, there are people who can straddle, in a potentially dangerous, Nietzschean way, a kind of relativism between ideologies.

Growth into each new stage entails a shift between comfortable equilibria. “Breakdown” as “breakthrough” is a phrase Kegan uses twice in The Evolving Self. The state of realizing something new about yourself—something others have always seen but never told you about—is an uncomfortable moment of vulnerability. It is the transition of metamorphosis, and takes the support of others to help you relate to yourself, and to them, in a new way.

Figure Without Ground

What makes Immunity to Change an airport book, different from the earlier The Evolving Self is that the theory expressed in the former is stripped of all “Freudian baggage” (a term used by a client of Kagen and Lahey) and streamlined into a consulting service marketed to corporate executives.

Back in 1982, Kegan the therapist referred frequently to Joyce's Stephen Daedelus and quoted long tracts from Eliot's Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets. He gives a wonderful little exegesis of a story from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphosis which I had only-just read the night prior. His case studies were patients undergoing psychotherapy : a single mother, an ex-convict, an unemployable miscreant. The Evolving Self carefully accounts for the different strains of psychology Kegan is synthesizing, taking care to delineate theoretical boundaries before crossing. He does his utmost respect to both the scholarship he draws on and the reader's ability to trace his origins. In this way, the book is “open source.”

By contrast, Kegan and Lahey have become expert marketers by 2009. My first reaction at reading Immunity to Change, I admit, was disgust. And rage. Here’s my initial article on the subject, written yesterday, after only reading the first quarter of the book:

With Immunity to Change, cowritten by Kagen and Lahey, the straight-jacket is secured around the subject. This is a book for leaders. The word leaders appears every page. The authors worked with leaders every step of the books development. Business leaders, government leaders. They brag about all the leaders they've impressed.

The history of the origins is reduced to “soft sciences.” Not psychology—certainly not psychoanalysis. Just the person sitting beside the “hard sciences” people at the “science” conference. That's all the authority that business executives be expected to respect, and so it's all that they need to know. The authors allude to their "laboratory," and then quickly qualify they don't wear white coats in their laboratory, for their lab is the whole world of business!

“Who the fuck is Winnicott?” is a question you never want your reader asking themselves three pages into an airport book. Stanley Milgram? Sure, drag him into it, relevance be damned—the Milgram Experiments have been referenced in pop-science/business management books for decades. These books are a genre—they have their universe of established references and those references are to be hewed too with knowing reverence. Never make your uncultured reader know it.

The first time the actual psychologists from the first book are brought up, several chapters in, it's in a sentence beginning “If we were to summarize the answer that arises from seventy-five years of research on the question—begun long before our time in the laboratories of developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget…”

Science! SCIENCE! You spent paragraphs haranguing on B.F. Skinner in 1982—now you wish you had his appeal! After all, he had a laboratory. It was full of rats running mazes and pushing buttons, because unlike all the other detestable psychologists who believed humans had inner thoughts, he was doing SCIENCE! 🥽🧪⚛️🧫🥼

Fess up! You're a damn psychoanalyst playing dress-up! You assume whatever authority is necessary to aid the transference, but you'll always be a cigar-chomping, dream interpreting, androgyny-worshipping head shrinker. Only instead of the single mother and ex-con and unemployable miscreant in your first book, now it's corporate executives that you put on your couch to reveal their unconscious. I'm sure they pay better—as long as they see it as purely science. All the references to studies and diagnostic tools as "technology" are a feint. You're a dirty Freudian—and you know exactly what all the “I fucking love science!” morons think about him.  You're a product of the humanities department. “Soft sciences” my retentive ass. Why do you have such success in business consulting? Because you're a poet. You learn and speak their language better than they do.

The problem to be solved is now—can you believe it?—“the flow of information” in business. That's right. Flow. Of Information. The target sales demo—middle managers aspiring to higher leadership—view others in entirely Shannon-Weaver terms of senders and receivers of information. Leaders lead through reports of what goes on—those who report to them are their very sense organs. The hangups, then, are in communication—that is, information flow as communication. That’s what these cogs are for.

The funny thing is that after writing that, I felt a rather reflexive tinge of discomfort with myself.

Here I am writing this Substack, asking you to pay me money.

I see Kegan writing a wonderfully literary and scholarly book in 1982 which likely gathered no readership outside of his field, and I see him selling out in 2009. And to do so, he strips everything I like out of his writing formula. He rips his insights out of its home in psychology, and grafts it into a god-damned “technology” of business-management “know-how.” He’s made psychoanalytic therapy into a machine-like algorithm.

As The Last Psychiatrist has often written, rage is a response to ego injury. I really liked the 1982 Kegan. I identified with him. He was very grounding, because he placed what he was saying within a world I was familiar with. I’ve been steeped in developmental psychology since the span of research I spent writing Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary. Kegan literally builds his book out of, to put it simply, the game of peekaboo, the same way I did.

Nobody who reads only the 2009 airport book is going to get anything of that sense of grounding, in history or theory, out of it. The leads are buried. The “x-ray” tool which Kegan and Lahey are selling to Fortune 500 companies, to be administered at their catered corporate retreats, is a figure without ground. A magical technology from the boys (and girls) in the back-room. A product.

And you know what got me the worst? This guy, this guy who wrote a book about how the more-developed self sees the older self, tells an interviewer in 2000

I can go back and look at things I’ve written and think, ugh, this is a pretty raw and distorted way of stating what I think I understand much better now.

The gall! I loved his book 1982, hated his book in 2009, and here he is, more developed, shitting all over the better him.

Take a Break

So what did I do. Well, I was quite primed from all this psychoanalytic reading to actually try and track down the origins of my rage. And then I bit my lip and kept reading the 2009 book.

The main improvement I can see in Immunity to Change is that Kegan has decoupled the formula for moving between plateaus of equilibria from any set, prescribed stages of life. He’s also rendered the explicit, object language of social belonging into an implicit, subject language of social belonging. In The Evolving Self, each stage is either a differentiation from family/society into becoming more of an individual or it’s a re-merger into family/society into becoming more of a group member.

But in a corporation employees are always part of team. So any explicit discussion of breaking away or individuating from the group is muted.

The book stopped grinding on me as I read. By the end, I tried using the algorithmic gimmick he was using. I found it helpful.

I also thought about the quote, given above, where older Kegan says “ugh” to the earlier Kegan. I had reacted to that quote as given, out of context, in the “Criticism” section of his own Wikipedia article. I read the entire interview,the quote was taken from and it was quite endearing. If you’re not going to read his books, read that interview instead.

I wrote yesterday’s piece, and then I decided to go out to the watering hole. I talked with some friends about my vulnerability in writing and they sympathized. Another friends came in just to meet me there, and we ended up at a 24-hour diner sharing a hot Apple straddle with Swiss cheese on top and ice-cream at four this morning. I was on a small dose of psilocybin on the insistence of another friend.

Owing my psychosis, I have a rule of never doing psychoactive chemicals, but last night I made an exception. It was fine.

I feel a lot less tense today. And less certain—but that’s what being between equilibria is like. That’s what metamorphosis is.

Kegan is right: social embedding is an essential environmental dimension for change. If you can’t have money, you better at least have friends.

Media Ecology as Outside In

But one’s social group is not the totality of one’s environment.

I was intended to write a lot more here, but I need to go to work in 20 minutes and there are many more days of this blog ahead. The primary problem with developmental psychology is that it’s inside-out. It’s complement, media ecology, is outside in.

Kegan tells us that the old us becomes the content of the new us. McLuhan, two decades prior, told us that the old environment is the content of the new environment.

We are not abstract nodes in a social network. We are embodied creatures walking around a human-scale world. We are equilibrated not just socially, or ideologically, but with our tools and machines: our media. Our stairs and houses and cars.

The “present” is the actual material world around us—and it is a Gorgon. Only artists can look on the present without turning to stone. If you don’t think so, then you’re not really looking at the present.

These two layered perceptions—the self growing outward in self-awareness, and the environment growing inward as new technologies supplant and envelop the old—need to be rendered commensurate and complementary.

Until then, ideas of “higher levels of development” are just going off into space. They are figure without ground. The more you get outside the old you, the more you get outside of everything. You lose the ground. You lose your body.

And you don’t know what you’re surrendering yourself old self to.

That is, I think, the primary intention of my project since Silicon & Charybdis.

If you think I’m onto something, help me out and subscribe. I owe a friend a few beers and a hot apple strudel.

Off to work.