Stages of Ego Development

[magickmystik]

I found the article recently, and I am sharing them here, it's pretty interesting model. Any comment?

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Loevinger/Cook-Greuter Model

Impulsive
Actions driven by impulses, physical urges. Emotions rage intently. People judged good or bad depending on how they meet the self’s needs. No sense of causation; dependent. Contrasts good/bad, clean/dirty, nice/mean. Food, water, sex and security are priorities

Self- Protective
Emergence of self-control. The rule is “don’t get caught.” Blame lies externally, exploitive, hedonistic. “Be what you are and get what you want regardless…” The world is a jungle full of threats and predators. Expects attention, demands respect, calls the shots.

Conformist
Conventional; moralistic; sentimental; rule bound; stereotyped; strong need to belong; emerging rudimentary awareness of feelings only understood at a banal level; conceptually thinking “black and white” thinking. Preoccupied with appearance, material possessions and social acceptance. “Laws discipline and regulation build character.” Absolutist thinking. Impulses controlled by guilt. Can hold dichotomies without seeing conflict.

Self-Aware
Somewhat differentiating viewpoint replaces the stark black and white perceptions. Increased, although limited self-awareness. Appreciation of multiple possibilities in situations. Rudimentary awareness of inner feelings of self and others. Banal level reflections on life issues such as relationships, death, and roles.

Conscientious
Rules are not absolutes, exceptions and contingencies are recognized. Self-evaluated standards, reflective; empathetic, true conceptual complexity, long term thinking, broader perspective, principled ethics, rich inner life of feelings, mutuality in relationships; self critical, values oriented. “People deserve their success.” “Societies prosper through strategy, technology and competition.”

Individualistic
High sense of individuality. Tolerant of self and others, incipient awareness of inner conflicts and personal paradoxes. Emerging awareness of differences between the perceived inner reality and overt appearances illustrate an increasing level of conceptual complexity. Values relationship over achievement – represents a conflict with material goals. Vivid unique self-expression. Inner awareness of personal paradoxes and conflicts.

Autonomous
Strives for self-knowledge as an enabler to self-actualization. Fulfillment replaces achievement as the main goal in life. Strives to either cope with his or her inner conflicts or transcend them. Transcends polarities for complex and multifaceted experience. High tolerance for ambiguity. Interdependent relationships rather than dependent or independent. Recognizes systematic nature of relationships. Vivid expression of feelings. With a diminished concern for conventionality, sex is enjoyed and sometimes accepted as simple physical causality.

Construct-aware
Realizes ever-changing flux of existence, begin to see material goals and even rational self-understanding as futile. Inner focus becomes a harsh beacon pushing beyond self-understanding toward the deconstruction of what shields the self from unfiltered reality. Dissects own thought and language habits to discover the pitfalls in his or her rational mental processes- leads to the uncovering of the fact that one’s automatic methods of meaning making appear futile. Frustration gives birth to the unprompted and sometimes startling discovery of a more direct way of knowing. “Realization that the pursuit of objective self-identifications and rational, value-free explanations of the universe are futile – artifacts of our need to make permanent and substantive that which is in flux and immaterial.” (SCG). Puts into motion at least two patterns of attempted integration with the old demands of the ego. Some individuals find that by cognitively constructing rational explanations of the world, and then deconstructing them, that they become revitalized. Others, perhaps those more intuitively inclined, yearn deeply for more of the transpersonal type of experience

Unitive
Sees one integrating and using transcendent experiences more frequently. Simplicity and joy often characterize attitude and express pure wonder at being alive. Profound and compa*sionate understanding of the human condition. Lighthearted, playful, humor and poetry. Nonevaluative, integrative, witnessing of the ongoing process of experience and meaning making: deep self-connectedness and appreciation. Transcendent awareness. No-body, no-thing. Direct experience of what is. Rational mind seen as one possible way of experiencing. Aware of “illusion” of permanent individual self. Intellect and intuition are used, but not overvalued.

more info
Loevinger's stages of ego dev - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia elopment
Paul Marko's: Mindful Enedavors

[AndyMartin]

Definitely good stuff if for no other reason than we have to become aware of our current level of development in order to transcend it. I forget who said, "The subject of the current stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage." So a model like this can help us both understand where we are and where we are going. But I have mixed feelings about models.

We're complicated creatures, so we need models to examine and comprehend our nature.

And...

We're simple beings who need nothing but our fundamental awareness to examine and comprehend our nature.

Next Stop: Ken Wilber

[DoAnyOfYouExist]

Good stuff, I am in between Construct-aware and Unitive. Good read, thanks for posting this.

[demk]

Originally Posted by AndyMartin

Next Stop: Ken Wilber

Love Ken Wilber at the moment. Get Kosmic Consciousness cds, theyre amazing.