Robert Kegan, in his article “Making Meaning: The Constructive-Developmental Approach to Persons and Practice,” breaks down a summary of this approach in a comprehensible way:

What is “constructive-developmental” psychology?

What I call “constructive-developmental” psychology—the study of the development of our construing or meaning-making activity—seems to offer practitioners a theoretical resource with considerable range and integrative capability. It is “developmental,” apparently not in the old-fashioned sense of “applying to children,” but of applying to the developing person throughout the lifespan.

Constructive-developmental psychology seems neither to romanticize a conception of the person (by considering all phenomena “developmental” but never forcing itself to take account of seriously debilitating psychological disturbance) nor to psychopathologize everyday life (by basing its conception of personality on the study of such disturbance alone). What it does seem to do is serve as a basis for integrating two professional stances that have become intellectually marooned—the reaction to disturbance (the “clinical” role) and the anticipation of disturbance (the “preventive” role).

What is this new framework? It might be better to say first what it is not. Although one can detect differing emphases or primary sources among various constructive-developmental theorists (e.g., a more cognitivist leaning [Kohlberg, 1969; Selman, 1974]; a more psychoanalytic leaning [Fingarette, 1963; Loevinger, 1976]; a more existential-phenomenological leaning [Kegan, 1979; Perry, 1970]), the framework is neither fundamentally cognitivist (it is as interested in the emotions as in cognition and does not reduce the emotional to the cognitive), nor is it fundamentally psychoanalytic (it does not locate the source of adult phenomena in early childhood experience; it is not so exclusively oriented to intrapsychic representations; it goes beyond the conservative, homeostasis-seeking picture of human motivation to include an adaptive, effectance-oriented motive of equal dignity), nor is it fundamentally existential-phenomenological (it is interested in a descriptive, external frame of reference on enduring regularities and distinctions between and within persons in their meaning-making).

Although the most visible feature of the constructive-developmental framework is the idea of the “stage,” the framework is not fundamentally about stages, which, in the end, are only a way of marking developments in a process. And it is this process that is fundamental to the framework (Kegan, 1979)—the process of the restless, creative activity of personality, which is first of all about the making of meaning.

Piagetian Influences:

The most influential forefather of the constructive-developmental framework is surely Jean Piaget (1952, 1954), and the framework is appropriately referred to as “neo-Piagetian.” Piaget’s research suggests a series of qualitatively different constructions of the physical world that children grow through as they develop. His work is now widely used as a road map to curricular goals concerning logical and intellectual development.

But over the past 25 years, the loosely related work of a number of researchers, when taken together, makes it clear that this developing “biologic” influences far more than the child’s construction of the physical world. Taken together, the work of Basseches (1978), Broughton (1975), Damon (1977), Fowler (1974), Gilligan (1978), Kegan (1979), Kohlberg (1969), Lasker (1978), Loevinger (1976), Parsons (in press), Perry (1970), Selman (1974), and others suggests that the developmental processes Piaget got hold of are the very context for our lifelong construction of our emotional, personal, and social worlds as well.

Indeed, what is “neo” about the constructive-developmental framework is that it moves from Piaget’s study of cognition to include the emotions; from his study of children and adolescents to include adulthood; from the study of stages of development to include the processes that bring the stages into being, defend them, and evolve from them; from Piaget’s descriptive, outside-the-person approach to include the study of the internal experience of developing; and from a solely individual-focused study of development to include study of the social context and role in development.

BASIC TENETS

Taken individually, the various theorists will reflect these “neo” elaborations to differing extents, but among the most widely shared tenets of the framework are these:

1. Human being is meaning-making. For the human, what evolving amounts to is the evolving of systems of meaning; the business of organisms is to organize, as Perry (1970) says. We organize mostly without realizing we are doing it, and mostly with little awareness as to the exact shape of our own reality-constituting. Our meanings are not so much something we have as something we are. Therefore, researchers and practitioners do not learn about a person’s meaning-making system by asking the person to explain it, but by observing the way the system actually works.

2. These meaning systems shape our experience. Experience, as Aldous Huxley said, is not so much what happens to us as what we make of what happens to us. Thus, we do not understand another’s experience simply by knowing the events and particulars of the other, but only by knowing how these events and particulars are privately composed.

3. These meaning systems, to a great extent, give rise to our behavior. We do not act as randomly, irrationally, unsystematically, or molecularly as might be thought. Even the most apparently disturbed, irrational, or inconsistent behavior is, as Carl Rogers often suggests, coherent and meaningful when viewed through the perspective of the actor’s constitution of reality.

4. Except during periods of transition and evolution from one system to another, to a considerable extent, a given system of meaning organizes our thinking, feeling, and acting over a wide range of human functioning.

5. Although everyone makes meaning in richly idiosyncratic and unique ways, there are striking regularities to the underlying structure of meaning-making systems and to the sequence of meaning systems that people grow through.

6. We are developing measures of increasing sensitivity to help us understand the meaning-making system of another.

7. We are beginning to learn about what facilitates or detains development.

8. But the framework is young, and its gleanings should be viewed cautiously and used tentatively.

NEWER TENETS

In my own work (Kegan, 1977, 1979, 1980), I have suggested that:

1. The deep structure of these meaning-making systems (their “biologic”) involves the developing person’s distinction between self and other, or, put more philosophically, between subject and object. Development involves a process of redifferentiating and reintegrating this relationship.

2. The internal experience of developmental change can be distressing. Because it involves the loss of how I am composed, it can also be accompanied by a loss of composure. This is so because, in surrendering the balance between self and other through which I have “known” the world, I may experience this as a loss of myself, my fundamental relatedness to the world, and meaning itself.

3. As practitioners, we can be most responsive to the person being helped by learning more about and engaging this meaning-making activity, rather than orienting first to the person’s “illness,” “problem,” “learning deficit,” or “stage,” none of which is the person.