Robert Kegan

Kegan supplies the mechanism for why reading this site can feel destabilizing rather than informative, and why that feeling is not a malfunction.

What you are embedded in, you cannot see. Development is the process by which what you were becomes something you have.

The subject-object shift

Kegan's central move is a distinction between what is subject and what is object in a person's mental life.

Subject is what you are fused with. You cannot reflect on it, because you are looking through it rather than at it. Object is what you can hold at a distance, examine, argue with, and decide about.

The subject-object shift is the conversion of the first into the second. A teenager who is their feelings becomes an adult who has feelings and can consider them. Someone who is their loyalty to a group becomes someone who holds that loyalty and can weigh it.

Every page on this site is an attempt at one of these shifts. Your habitus was subject, it felt like personality, and the point of the Bourdieu page is to make it object. The same is true of common sense, of modulation, and of the assumption that the assessment ends.

Why it costs something

If what you could not see was also what you were, then seeing it is a loss before it is a gain. Kegan is explicit that these transitions involve real grief and a period where the old way has gone and the new one has not arrived.

His broader argument in In Over Our Heads is that modern life makes demands that exceed the developmental capacity most adults have, and that the result is a chronic sense of being overwhelmed by tasks that look, from outside, like ordinary adulthood.

What it implies for this site

Two things. That the discomfort of these pages is the process rather than a sign the pages are badly written. And that a reader cannot be argued into a shift, because you cannot reason your way out of something you are currently looking through. What helps is a supportive holding environment, in Kegan's term: enough challenge to force the shift, enough support to survive it.

That is a design brief, and it is the reason this site pairs difficulty with something usable rather than delivering difficulty alone.

Serious objections

• Stage theories imply that later is better and that everyone travels the same road. Both claims have been criticized as culturally specific, with the endpoint looking a great deal like an educated Western professional.
• The empirical base is small. Assessment relies on a lengthy subject-object interview scored by trained raters, and the sample sizes behind the stage claims are modest.
• The theory is widely used in corporate leadership development, where it functions as a ranking of people. That use is worth noticing given what the rest of this site says about measurement.