Cook-Greuter

Susan Cook-Greuter is a researcher from Harvard University who has studied with Robert Kegan and has been an active member of the Society for Research in Adult Development (SRAD) for several years. She has researched the ego development model of Jane Loevinger and has scored thousands of protocols using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT). She has focussed on the later stages of ego development, and has made distinctions in the data that Loevinger’s method of analysis did not reveal. Cook-Greuter has argued for the existence of higher stages in the model than Loevinger argued for (Cook-Greuter, 1990, 1994, 1995). In the following presentation of her work, I am relying on her most recent (Cook-Greuter, 1995) terminology.

In the period of life with which we are concerned (the post-conventional or post-personal stages, what Cook-Greuter calls the Construct-Aware), people are described as changing in a number of significant ways. One aspect of such a change is a new attitude toward language. In earlier stages of development, language is valued because it affords communication, enabling people to cognitively package reality into discrete entities on their conceptual maps. In later mature stages, language is experienced as filtering the underlying reality and therefore leaving out the richness of experience. People at the Construct-Aware stage yearn to apprehend an unfiltered reality, a reality of flux and change not tied down with conventional labels and definitions.

People experience a new attitude toward the functioning of ego at higher stages as well. Whereas in earlier stages of development, people take a certain self-reflective pleasure and delight in working with their complexity and contradiction—that is, in thinking about themselves—with higher development in the Construct-Aware stage, people question their "objective self-identity" altogether, no longer wishing to be in control in the ways they have been. From the point of view of an emerging maturity, self-control has required being too watchful, too vigilant, of the image of self as presented in the social theatre of the mind. Self-consciousness is experienced as a form of limitation. People at the Construct-Aware Stage intuit another mode of being based on non-control, on an “un-boundedness,” a mode of experiencing liberated from deep-rooted habits, a mode of existing that does not require effort, that is grounded in "radical openness," a mode of being that is not grounded in ego. On the down side, however, this change in attitude toward ego can increase levels of anxiety, lower self-esteem, heighten loneliness, and even lead to moments of the feeling of being "nothing."

Cook-Greuter labels this level the Construct-Aware. She notes that this transition is equivalent in significance to the development from the pre-representational to representational stages in childhood, which required extensive social mediation in the form of language learning. Likewise, the Construct-Aware transition, as the linking stage from what is termed representational to post-representational development, may require very specific cultural supports, supports of an altogether different nature from those required in childhood, supports that do not require further socialization. Cultural supports are needed that go beyond the simple internalization of norms and rules. These supports include meditation techniques, lineages, and teachers.

Cook-Greuter shows that the Construct-Aware self is aware of the filtered nature of its world, contingent on language and on maintaining the illusion of a stable ego that is in control. When such a self is weary of its old habits and longs to break through to a more im-mediate reality, I would like to suggest that we describe the self as ready to take up spiritual practice. Switching our metaphors from auditory to tactile, we can describe the mature self as longing for a naked mode of experiencing. Meditation can be characterized as a disciplined practice in keeping contact with sensations at the raw and un-mediated level, without the need for protective covers, without the need for conceptual filters.

Again, adopting another metaphor—this time a metaphor based on tactile experiences of effort and resistance—we can say that the change at this stage is a shift from a consciousness oriented to securing greater autonomy by means of greater control to a consciousness oriented to giving up control altogether. And this is how the practice of meditation is relevant: it involves learning a disciplined mindfulness that short-circuits the ego's constant need to control by grasping and clinging. Yet, while relinquishing control, meditation practice requires that we remain wide awake, that we be mindful. We cannot simply give in to whatever greed or lust or fantasies arise once conventional forms of self-control are discarded. Indeed, it would appear that meditation provides the solution to the unavoidable mental loops that Cook-Greuter identifies as existing at the Construct-Aware Stage: how to use effort to get beyond control.

Cook-Greuter has studied ego development empirically, revealing changes we are equating here with transpersonal development. She uses as her source of data Jane Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT), a projective assessment instrument which asks subjects to complete in writing a set of 36 sentence stems with their own thoughts. She has analysed her subjects' sentence completions reliably by a coding method that reveals developmental stages in levels of response.

Cook-Greuter proposed her Stage 5/6 while attempting to analyse data according to Loevinger’s theory. Cook-Greuter began to differentiate stage 5/6 (the Construct-Aware) from both Stage 5 (the Autonomous) and Stage 6 (the Unitive). She reports that she has developed a means of coding for distinctions between 5/6 and 6 and that she has been able to train novice raters to criteria (correlations were .79 to .95, Cronbach’s alpha was .95, and percent agreement among raters was 93.3).

The characteristics of the Construct-Aware Stage reveal a consciousness still embedded in ego, still immersed in personal levels of development, and still operating with the currency of representational thinking, but now yearning for an existence beyond such limitations, yearning for a transpersonal mode of being.

According to Cook-Greuter’s revised version of Loevinger’s model, a child comes into the world without an ego, without a differentiation of itself from the world around it. As the child begins to separate from the mother, he or she identifies first with their impulses, and can only be restrained by rewards and punishments. This is the Impulsive Stage. As the child learns how rewards and punishments operate in the external world, he or she develops the first forms of self-control—ushering in the Self-Protective Stage. But with the attainment of the Conformist Stage, the child identifies fully with the group. The child takes in the forms of socialization and identifies fully with them; in fact, the child has no self apart from the voice of others. The child (or adolescent) seeks approval, and thus is nice, complies and cooperates.

But there is still as yet no internal, or what we might call psychological, life. There is no appreciation of a subjective life apart from group norms and reputations. As an internal life dawns, the child enters into the Self-Aware Stage: the self becomes something distinct from norms and expectations, it becomes a distinct object of reflection, and therefore creates a space for exceptions to cultural expectations. With the attainment of the Conscientious Stage, the older child or adolescent can be said to have its own self or identity apart from the group: rules are fully internalized, but are one’s own in a more conscious and articulated manner—standards are self-chosen, traits are conceptualized as part of an interior world. Able to reason and reflect across time and society, the ego constructs a rich psychological causality. The mature youth is now ready to enter the adult world.

But that is not the end of development. After the Conscientious Stage is the Individualistic Stage. The often simplistic ideals of youth are questioned; self-certainty gives way to the perception of internal contradiction. The self begins to distance itself from role identities; subjective experience is emphasized at the expense of the now-questioned status of "objective reality." There is an appreciation of development and an acknowledgment of the discrepancy between inner and outer reality. There is a greater tolerance of self and others and a greater appreciation of contradiction.

But as the Autonomous Stage replaces the Individualistic, the self transcends and integrates psychological complexities even more. The role of conscience is attenuated, emotional dependencies are acknowledged rather than repressed, and sexuality is accepted more openly. People are construed as part of larger social totalities. As the self integrates more of its compartmentalized identities, it aims for a form of meaning based in self-actualization and self-determination. At the next stage, the Construct-Aware, the very substantiality of the self is questioned.

But even this stage is transcended in rare cases by the Unitive Stage. Embedded in the process of creation, the Unitive self is based on a global and universal vision. The concrete and temporal are apprehended as part of the eternal. Things are accepted as they are. Ego boundaries are transcended. There is an immersion in the ongoing process of being. Whereas at earlier levels of development, the nothingness of the self is experienced as anxiety-provoking, at the Unitive Stage the enlarged, open, and more relaxed self can accept that at the heart and bottom of its being that it is truly a “no-thing.”