THE POSTCONVENTIONAL
PERSONALITY.......
This edited book on the farthest reaches of adult holistic development includes a brief introduction and 13 diverse and separately authored chapters. These are of digestible length and comprise the 232 pages of substantive text, not counting references, index, and other welcomed scholarly assists. The book’s diversity is reflected in the authors’ position titles. Eight chapters include an author who holds a faculty position in a department of psychology, four include an author who is extensively employed as a leadership/management consultant, and six include an author who holds a position title related to integral studies or the study of consciousness.
The introduction surveys Loevinger’s ego stages in relation to Susanne Cook-Greuter’s extension of these stages and usefully provides a concordance of revised ego stage names that chapter authors have used in their adaptations of her measure. The book is then divided into three broad sections: (a) assessment issues, (b) emerging research, and (c) theories of postconventional development. These sections are indeed topics in the book, but also chapters typically are broader than the sections to which they are assigned. The order of chapters worked well for me, with the notable exception of the placement of chapter 2, which disrupted my tracking the assessment issues that flow from chapter 1 to chapters 3 and 4.
The book was originally conceived as a Festschrift to Jane Loevinger in recognition of her work in founding a scientifically productive theory of ego development, but that is only one point of reference that links the chapters. Nonetheless, the book’s opening attention to issues in assessing higher level ego functioning reassuringly connected me with her regulatory ideals for rigor and clear thinking or explicitly offered another perspective on these ideals. In chapter 1, Angela Pfaffenberger reviews the validity of Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test (SCT). She empirically addresses how its adaptation into the Harthill Leadership Development Profile (LDP) yields somewhat lower estimates of ego level and observes that the two scoring systems may not be equivalent measures of advanced ego development, though they overlap. In chapter 4, Cook-Greuter summarizes the extensive data base of sentence completion protocols that has supported her identification of a 10th stage of ego development. Her main focus is on her rationale and standards for revisions of the SCT and on her various and evolving assessment purposes, which she has pursued in collaboration with others. Both of these chapters are informative and treat traditional assessment concerns with sufficient respect. Because I was well alerted to measurement issues that were afoot, I was ready as a reader to expect and look for empirical groundings in the book’s chapters and was less troubled when these were not as apparent or in the form I preferred.
Integral Leadership Review readers will appreciate that many of the chapters are positioned in relation to Ken Wilber’s integral theory and/or to the wisdom traditions of Eastern philosophy, which in substance seemed to be referenced as frequently as the developmental psychologists who more typically define the field of ego development in academia. There is an intellectual heft and even satisfying wholeness to this book that belies its small size and the wide diversity of the authors’ perspectives and backgrounds. The explicit binding focus is what the editors perhaps reluctantly settled on calling in the book’s title, the postconventional personality. A more descriptive term for the abiding focus might be, the postconventional self, which Jack Bauer uses in the title of his chapter. Perhaps this alternative title felt relatively discordant to those who reference the transcendence of the ego as the teleological end-point of spiritual or integral development. Of course, the term self (or its more formal cognate, ego) is perilously ambiguous in any tradition without clear reference. Moreover, in popular imagination, its connotations are drawn from the lower stages of ego development. And yet, it also seems indispensable if I am to use a single term to describe the center of gravity of this book, which is the various ways of being-in-the-world that are self-reflexively distinct from merely received societal conventions for construing purpose and meaning. For most of the authors, the termpostconventional self references ego development that is at or beyond Loevinger’s individualist stage, which in the book’s concordance is stage 7. But also, the broad categorical naming of the self of the highest stages may be further distinguished.
There is a general consensus among authors on the need to distinguish structural development of the ego, as a way of being in the world, from more ephemeral states of peak awareness. Indeed, this distinction between advanced structural development and heightened moments of consciousness is one of the thematic threads of the book. Chapter authors most often make the distinction in relation to the Wilber-Combs lattice and, more generally, integral theory, where concordances between levels of awareness and stages of ego development have been postulated.
On the one hand, the lattice posits that levels of awareness states (as defined in Eastern traditions) are, in some formal sense, concordant with stages of ego development. On the other, the lattice’s function within integral theory is to represent empirical discordances between a state of awareness and a stage of development so that these discordances can be theoretically leveraged or addressed. This is not an idle concern for integral theorists
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