Robert Kegan is an American developmental psychologist and professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he held the chair in adult learning and professional development [IC]. His constructive-developmental theory describes how adults make meaning through a sequence of five orders of consciousness.
Contribution
Kegan’s orders run from the imperial mind through the socialized mind (third order) and the self-authoring mind (fourth order) to the self-transforming mind (fifth order). In Over Our Heads (1994) argues that the mental demands of modern life already exceed the developmental capacity of most adults. The wiki maps the fourth order onto Material Consciousness and the fifth onto Mycelial Consciousness; see Structures of Consciousness. The Nordic Secret reads nineteenth-century Bildung as the practice that moved people from the third order to the fourth, which is the bridge the wiki’s Bildung page builds on. With Lisa Laskow Lahey he developed the Immunity to Change method for working with the hidden commitments that block personal and organizational change.
Selected works
- The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (1982)
- In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1994)
- Immunity to Change (with Lisa Laskow Lahey, 2009)
- An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (with Lisa Laskow Lahey and others, 2016)
Related pages
Sources
- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads
Provenance
Created 30 October 2026 with the Bildung pages, for a theorist the wiki already cited on several pages without a person page. Public roles and published work only.