59In Over Our Heads

Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard University Press, 1994

Linked to 20 chapters: supports 9 · contradicts 3 · mechanism 10 · same claim 5 · pairing 3

In the decade after The Evolving Self Kegan read widely in what academics call, without irony, the literatures: the marriage literature, the management literature, the adult education literature, the parenting literature. He came away with two observations. The expectations running through these books are not expectations about behaviour, or about skills, or about what a person knows; they are expectations about how a person knows. And the literatures do not read each other, so that nobody is looking at what is being asked of the adult as a whole. This book puts the literatures side by side and subjects all of them to one analysis. What emerges is a single, unrecognised claim: that an adult be the author rather than the theatre of his own values, loyalties and inner states. Kegan calls this the fourth order of consciousness. He then asks the question nobody had asked empirically, using an interview his research group spent years making reliable, and answers that at any moment something like one-half to two-thirds of adults have not fully reached it. The title is the consequence. At the leading edge of the same literatures a further set of demands is forming, which he identifies as a fifth order, which almost nobody meets, and which he says nobody reaches before their forties.

David Elkind's The Hurried Child had argued that we give children responsibilities before they are ready for them, and Kegan notes what must already be true for that alarm to move us: we believe the mind of a child differs in kind from the mind of an adult. Having won that distinction, he proposes, it remains for us to discover that adulthood is not an end state either. So to the list of things a culture creates and the social sciences study, he adds the claims a culture makes on the minds of its members. Treated as a school, contemporary culture has a hidden course of study, and the questions one asks of any course of study can be asked of it. What complexity does it demand? What complexity is the student capable of? How good is the fit? The tool for answering is the theory of The Evolving Self, matured by ten years of use, most of it empirical: working with Laura Rogers, then Lisa Lahey, Emily Souvaine, Robert Goodman and Sally Felix, Kegan turned a set of ideas into an instrument, the Subject-Object Interview, with a manual published in 1988 explaining how to administer and score it.

"Whaddaya want from me?"

Peter and Lynn are awake at two in the morning. Their son Matty is sixteen, his curfew was midnight, and he is not home. When he arrives with a story about somebody's car and somebody else's jacket, his mother does not congratulate him on the independence that delighted her when he was ten and put a sign on his bedroom door reading Adults Keep Out. She tells him the house is not a hotel and that it is time he thought about somebody other than himself.

What kind of thing is she asking for? Not behaviour: a Matty who came home on time purely to avoid consequences would not satisfy her. Not feeling either, or not only, because feelings come from somewhere. What Lynn wants is for Matty to care about what she cares about, which means she wants his mind to be different. And when Kegan lays out everything else the culture asks of teenagers — that they be employable, be good citizens, think abstractly and critically, identify their inner motivations, have common sense, have friends without being led by them, hold ideals — he argues that every item makes the identical demand.

To see why, he goes back to what happens between five and ten. A child in those years discovers that the quantity of a liquid does not change when it is poured into a narrower glass; that a person who could not have known his actions would hurt someone cannot be called mean; and that "I don't like spinach" reports something ongoing rather than something felt now. Three discoveries about three different worlds, produced by one principle: the durable category, a class with properties that do not depend on how things look or what one wishes.

That principle is not enough for what Matty's parents want. To hold their point of view in a way he could identify with, he would have to give up an absolute relation to his own and subordinate it to the relation between his and theirs. He needs a principle whose members are durable categories themselves. Kegan calls it cross-categorical knowing, and it is the same move that produces abstraction: a definition takes concrete examples as its elements, an inference takes facts as its elements, and reflective thinking requires a place to stand outside a thought in order to bend attention back on it. Trustworthiness and abstraction turn out to be one accomplishment in two domains.

Underneath sits the distinction the theory is built from. Object refers to the elements of our knowing that we can reflect on, handle, look at, be responsible for, take control of, relate to each other. Subject refers to the elements we are identified with, tied to, fused with, embedded in. "We have object; we are subject."¹ Subject is immediate and object mediate; subject is absolute and object relative. Every principle of mental organisation is constituted by some arrangement of the two, and growth is the migration of contents from the first column to the second. The relation between successive orders is therefore not additive but incorporative: each takes the previous whole as one of its parts, the way a line contains points and a plane contains lines. Asked what a film is about, a small child names a character, an older child recounts the plot end to end, and only at the third order does the plot become an instance of a theme.

Kegan is careful that "order" means dimension and not sequence. Each one goes meta on the last.

A bridge must be well anchored on either side

The second half of the story about adolescence is that adolescents do not arrive at thirteen with the third order in hand. The developmental studies, his own included, suggest that the years from twelve to twenty are the period during which that transformation gradually happens. It is therefore normal for a teenager to be unable to meet what adults expect, and the danger lies in how the failure gets read. If the expectations are taken to be about behaviour, the disappointing adolescent is incompetent; if about feelings, he is disturbed. Either reading credits him with a mind he does not yet have and then finds it faulty.

Kegan's extreme case is the adolescent diagnosed as sociopathic, and he reads the clinical descriptions structurally. A judge asks a young man how he could steal from people who trusted him and is told that it is very hard to steal from people who do not. The judge was fishing for inner states and got a narration of logically sequential behaviours, which is what self-reflection amounts to when there is no coordination of viewpoints inside the self to reflect upon. Roxanne, an inmate who had stolen other people's welfare cheques, held that it was right for her to take a cheque because she needed it and wrong for someone to take hers because she needed it: consistent, if not reciprocal. The sociopath is not without a morality, only without the one we want.

Asked to stand on one leg like Hillel and say what an environment must do for its members to grow, Kegan answers that "people grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge"² and that the rest is commentary. Challenge without support is toxic and breeds defensiveness; support without challenge is boring and breeds devitalisation. Graded on challenge, the culture-as-school does well: the demand for cross-categorical knowing reaches the adolescent at home, at school, at work and among friends, it is consistent across all of them, and it sits just beyond reach rather than far beyond it. Graded on support, it does badly. The supports that exist constitute a holding environment, which acknowledges a person exactly as he is now and at the same time works at the undoing of that way of knowing — a transitional culture, an evolutionary bridge.

Three adolescents from The Evolving Self make the point. Roxanne was sent to a prison, Terry to a psychiatric hospital and Richard to a job-training programme; they were sorted as criminal, sick and unemployable, and all three needed the same transformation. Roxanne's prison ran a token economy that shaped the behaviours of good citizenship and did nothing about the person producing them; inmates in such programmes return at no lower a rate than others. Terry's milieu unit required patients to speak in group meetings about their inner conflicts, read her talk about what other people were doing as resistance, and eventually exiled her. Richard's programme was a boatworks. What he saw on arrival was a half-finished boat, a letter offering several thousand dollars for it, and competent adults willing to teach him to build one. His self-interest was hired rather than reproved, and only afterwards did working in crews make his own point of view something he had to hold alongside other people's. Two years in, he said he used to worry about getting caught and now worried about other people worrying.

Minding our children, love and consciousness

Peter and Lynn reappear as adults. The parenting literature asks them to institute a vision for the family, to manage the boundaries between the generations, and to set limits on the children, on themselves and on everyone outside. The partnering literature asks them to be psychologically independent of each other, to get past an idealised approach to closeness, to support each other's development, to listen without defending, and to know how their own histories incline them.

Alice, separated a year, is asked by her ten-year-old in the supermarket whether she has had sex since Daddy left, lies, and is tormented by the lie. Truthfulness is a value, a generalisation across particulars, and the third order can hold values; what it cannot do is hold values about values, a system for choosing when two of them conflict. One can be responsible to one's roles at the third order. Being responsible for them requires the fourth. Ibsen supplies the clearest case: when Nora leaves, Torvald appeals to religion as an infallible guide, and Kegan reads the appeal to an infallible guide outside oneself as the essence of psychological dependence. Nora is not adopting new ideas; she is adopting a new set of ideas about where ideas come from and who authorises them.

His treatment of support here is the sharpest in the book. We normally think of support in quantities — how extensive the network is, how close, how consistent, how much people care. He asks instead about its borrowability: whether the surround will lend a person an order of consciousness he cannot yet compose. The traditional community is the paradigm case. Its creeds differ, but at the level of form they all deliver a fourth order ready-made, and it need not come from the member's own mind. Modernity fragments that monolith, leaving a great many capable adults in the position of traditional people living in a modern world, obliged to shift the gears themselves.

On seeking to hire the self-employed

Lynn teaches English at Highland Junior High and chairs the department. The school has gone over to school-based management and she sits on the principal's new Leadership Council. When the history chair proposes a year's experiment in which teachers hire and may fire their own consultants, with no write-ups and no entries in anyone's file, the principal speaks first instead of last and says it is something they cannot do. Lynn asks, in front of everyone, whether what he is proposing is illegal. Summoned to the office and told she has undermined a partnership and traded badly on years of loyalty, she replies that she is grateful and loyal and a team player, and that her boss cannot want a colleague who is a clone. She comes away concluding that if the school is to be a learning place it has to be one for the principal too, and that some of her own sarcasm came from disliking in her boss a hesitation she recognises in herself.

Peter has spent nineteen years at BestRest, a bedding manufacturer, under a mentor named Anderson Wright who took him into the sisal room to learn what manufacturing meant. Anderson turns a regulatory burden — mandatory flame-retardant fabrics — into a product line, then hands Peter the line as a company of its own, SafeSleep, with himself as banker rather than boss. Peter accepts without deliberating, the way a spouse follows a restationed officer, and nothing has felt right since. He describes the old job as a long game of catch and the new one as juggling: five balls, then ten, then fifteen, thrown to him by other people, none of which may drop. Anderson has become impossible to read, and Peter cannot ask, because the one thing he knows for certain is that asking would disappoint him.

Kegan distils six expectations from the management writing. We are to invent or own our work rather than see it as the employer's; to be self-initiating, self-correcting and self-evaluating; to be guided by our own visions rather than captive of the authority's agenda; to take responsibility for what happens to us at work, internally as well as externally; to be masters of our jobs rather than apprentices; and to conceive the organisation from the outside in. Lynn meets all six without appearing to try, the way a practised cyclist keeps her balance. She distinguishes the social power a principal holds over a teacher's job from the psychological power to define who owns the teacher's work: a hospital administrator, she says, does not tell the surgeon where to cut.

Peter's condition has a name in the literature and Kegan rejects it. Peter Block writes that the dependent employee wrongly believes the most trustworthy source of knowledge lies outside himself, and urges employers to create ways to push authority inside the person. Kegan observes that the very same way of revering, appearing in Matty, is welcomed as an achievement. Calling it dependency treats it as a blight on an otherwise fine character, as though Peter had an integrity he keeps sacrificing; calling it a skills deficit treats it as something missing that can be put in. Both leave the form alone and work on its contents. That is training. Education, from ex plus ducere, is a leading out from one organisation of mind in favour of a larger one.

The writing on burnout does the same damage, describing the burnout-prone employee as submissive, unassertive and short of ambition. Arriving at a fourth-order workplace with third-order consciousness does put a person at risk; what Kegan objects to is the risk being called a character defect. It is a poor school whose favourite students are the ones it does not have to teach.

Self-possession is not a class marker or a professional credential. The Taiwanese labour educator Lin-Ching Hsia records a factory owner walking unannounced into a meeting of 250 workers debating whether to accept a management-designed union and speaking warmly of his affection for people who had played in those rooms with him as a child. After three minutes of silence a worker replied that the gesture was a kind one, that because of his position his words would be received as an order, and that the workers needed the space to decide for themselves. The worker is teaching the distinction between our connection to persons and our connection to the roles they occupy, and he calls the lesson modernism. Some lawyers, Kegan adds, are not professionals and some housecleaners are.

Halfway through the book Kegan stops to ask whether Lynn and Peter resemble anybody real. Lisa Lahey interviewed people about their love lives and their work lives on a finely graded measure and found a striking consistency within subjects across the two. A longitudinal study by Kegan, Lahey, Souvaine, Nancy Popp and Stephanie Beukema reinterviewed twenty-two adults annually for four years and again five years later; scored blind to the earlier years, changes were almost always towards greater complexity, always gradual, never skipping a position. Then the question of where adults are. Reviewing twelve studies that used random rather than stratified samples, Kegan assembles a composite of 282 adults, whiter, wealthier and better educated than the country, in which 59 per cent have not fully reached the fourth order; a separate sample of sixty graduate students gives 48 per cent, and in the three studies spanning the full range of social class only 21 per cent reach the fourth order or beyond. Nobody in any study reached the fifth. William Torbert, using Loevinger's sentence-completion test with supervisors, nurses, managers and executives, finds the most frequent position for nearly every group to lie between the third and fourth orders, and 58 per cent short of the fourth in a composite of almost five hundred professionals.

"The teacher wants us to be self-directing"

Adults over twenty-five had become the largest and fastest-growing sector of American education, and by the turn of the century more than half of those studying for undergraduate degrees would be twenty-five or older. The field that serves them had converged on an image of what it wants: the self-directed learner, who in Gerald Grow's summary separates what she feels from what she should feel and what she values from what she should value, sets her own goals and standards, and uses experts and institutions as resources for goals she has set. Kegan's objection is exact. When the third order governs, what one should feel is what one does feel. The goal is not to notice a distinction that already exists but to bring one into being, which means asking students to put at risk the loyalties that have been the foundation of their lives. Personal authority is acquired only by altering one's relation to public authority, and for much of the way that feels less like an expedition than a mutiny.

William Perry built a course at Harvard for adults drowning in assigned reading, and Kegan taught it under his supervision. It opened each day with a darkened room and a page projected mostly in shadow, an illuminated band moving across it at increasing speed, followed by a comprehension test. Perry knew eyeball training buys almost nothing; the exercise made sense to a conscientious student who believed his difficulty was a lack of skill, and so anchored the bridge at the near end. Then he handed out texts and told his students not to read them — to hunt instead, against the clock, for the answer to a question he supplied; then to skim the end matter, work out roughly what a text was about, and generate a question of their own to take to it. The bridge was complete on the day they brought in the reading for their graded courses. Some were angry; some, now handling four or five times as much reading, felt they were cheating. Most were frightened, and asked how they could know their own questions would be their professor's. Better reading, Perry told them, turns out not to be a challenge to their intelligence but a challenge to their courage.

Laurent Daloz shows the other half of the same hospitality. A biblical literalist in her sixties brings him a health textbook, tells him it is pornography, and weeps in the office of a man she has never met; he assures her she will not be made to read it, and then says that what was striking about Jesus was his ability to go among the publicans and sinners and love them anyway. She says she supposes she is not perfect, and stays in school. Daloz neither disdains her religion nor asks her to leave it at the gate; he extends the gate. She is no less a self-directed learner than anyone else, Kegan adds. It is a different self she is directing, and what the experts want is learning directed by a self organised at the fourth order.

The same reading explains the student who takes "think for yourself" to mean "be sincere" and asks whether her C means she has B-plus sincerity. If her writing is addressed to the teacher on behalf of the bond between them, then disliking the paper puts the bond in jeopardy, and the evaluation completes the act of writing rather than commenting on it. Kegan turns the same argument on Kenneth Bruffee, for whom there is no structure of thought, only a consensus reached by a community of knowledgeable peers, and teaching is socialisation into a discourse community: the third order is precisely the mind that is capable of, and subject to, socialisation, responsive to it but not responsible for it. One further finding bears on all this. Over 70 per cent of the adults in the longitudinal study had not reached the fourth-order threshold when they entered their graduate programme; by the fourth year, 70 per cent had. The bridge is not only the school: it reaches into the student's family and friends, who are required to see her differently, and whose resistance, where it can be renegotiated, is itself the material of the change.

The demand at the leading edge

Two couples have been married twenty-five years and both call it a good marriage. The Ables say they had to learn how to fight, that their differences are now one of the strengths of the marriage, and that they visit each other's way of seeing like respectful anthropologists. The Bakers say something else. Their best moments come when they stop pretending the opposites live only in the other person — when the activist notices the contemplative inside him and the strict parent notices her own looser feeling. Their favourite fights are the ones in which they do not solve the conflict but let the conflict solve them, on the theory that a quarrel which will not go away is usually a sign that one of them has become too identified with a comfortable half of himself.

Both couples meet the modern demand to construct the self as a system. The difference is what they do with that system. The Ables treat it as complete and prior, and conflict as the by-product of two complete selves interacting. The Bakers treat it as incomplete and suspect it of pretending otherwise, and take the relationship as prior to its parts. Kegan's image is a glass cylinder with a marble in it: one can say the tube joins two openings, or that the openings exist only because there is a tube. The fifth order moves form and system from subject to object. It is trans-systemic, and this is what he thinks postmodernism is — not merely a different way of thinking but an identifiable position on the same evolutionary line, post to the fourth order.

The same move sorts the literature on public disputes. Since the 1960s social psychologists have built settings in which antagonists recognise each other's needs and fears and look for solutions protecting what each holds precious; that work changes attitudes about the other's willingness to respect one's position rather than the positions, and assumes throughout that the parties are whole and prior. A fifth-order approach asks instead that they read a protracted conflict as a sign that both have become identified with poles — the Palestinian discovering her Israeli-ness, the rich man his poverty. Chris Argyris reports that highly educated, senior adults have great difficulty mastering what he teaches, and Kegan says this is what one should expect.

Ronald Heifetz and Riley Sinder found the leadership writers agreeing, across every political difference, that a leader must craft a coherent vision and recruit people into it — the fourth-order demand on parents transposed to public life. They propose instead a leader who creates a setting in which everyone, herself included, makes the vision, and who then goes on standing up for the likelihood that it is incomplete. Kegan distinguishes two ways of being post to the fourth order. A deconstructive one holds that any plan whatever privileges, normatises and excludes, and so deserves nobody's identification — a position that says clearly where one should not stand and offers nowhere to stand. A reconstructive one keeps judgment, generalisation and hierarchy, on the ground that a theory can be a theory about theory-making, whose maturity shows not in defending itself against every challenge but in seeking the contradictions by which it is rebuilt. Nicholas Burbules and Suzanne Rice make the same split and call the first antimodernism, describing it as unsustainable and oversimplifying. Kegan replies that the position is entirely sustainable from inside — differentiation always precedes integration, and antimodernism is the differentiation.

The last chapter is a caution to the enthusiasts, who are pushing for the honours track to replace the regular course of study. The diversity movement, Kegan argues, is not the arrival of postmodernism; its challenges are not about the limits of modernism but about the rationed supply of support for reaching it, and a community of liberation ideology is one of the better holding environments for composing a fourth order rather than transcending one. Rereading Freud and Chodorow on boys, girls and early attachment, he finds that Chodorow inverts Freud's hierarchy without disturbing it, so that both remain absolutist theories differing only in what sits on top. When Václav Havel told the World Economic Forum that the end of communism was the end of the modern age, Kegan agreed that this is how it struck Havel, and doubted it was what it meant to millions for whom the fall of a totalitarian ideology might at last permit an authority of their own. Misattributing the transformation people are actually seeking, he writes, makes us good company for the wrong journey. In his longitudinal study movement beyond the fourth order is rare, and where it occurs it is never before the forties — the age at which life ended for most people a century earlier. His speculation is that the extra generation of life is the precondition for the extra order of mind.

Since 1994

The instrument outlived the argument. The Subject-Object Interview and its 1988 manual became the standard measure in this tradition, and the third-to-fourth-order transition became the organising idea of Kegan's later work with Lisa Lahey: the four-column immunity map of Immunity to Change in 2009, and the deliberately developmental organisations of An Everyone Culture in 2016. Ronald Heifetz, whose essay supplied this book's account of leadership, went on to build the distinction between technical and adaptive work, which carries the same point in a vocabulary managers use. The language of levels of mind is now routine in coaching, generally in forms far looser than a scored interview would license.

The empirical claim has worn less well than the conceptual one. The estimate that one-half to two-thirds of adults have not reached the fourth order rests on a composite of twelve small dissertation samples that Kegan himself describes as unrepresentative, plus one study of sixty graduate students; it is not a probability sample of any population, and the coding, though it achieves high agreement between raters, is laborious and interpretive. The claim about the fifth order rests on no positive cases at all: nought out of 282. Whether the orders are genuine stages, rather than descriptions a skilled rater can impose on any interview, is still argued; so is the charge, which Kegan answers at length by separating relational voice from epistemological structure, that a hierarchy topped by self-authorship encodes one culture's idea of maturity. His demographic argument is the weakest part of the book. Life expectancy at birth in the United States around 1900 was roughly forty-seven years, a figure driven by infant and child mortality, and an adult of that era who reached twenty could expect to live well past the age at which Kegan says the fifth order first appears.

What holds is the distinction the book was written to make. A demand for a skill and a demand for a different mind look identical in the language of expertise and are not the same request, and the second cannot be satisfied by training, exhortation or a better list of competencies. The practical consequence is the one Kegan spends the book pressing: a demand issued without a support is not a standard but a punishment, and the people it punishes are usually described as deficient in exactly the qualities they are working hardest to build.