Personality Development

Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Investigations of Loevinger's Conception of Ego Development

P. Michiel Westenberg, Augusto Blasi, Lawrence D. Cohn, P. Michiel Westenberg, Augusto Blasi, Lawrence D. Cohn

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134788415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Jane Loevinger's innovative research methodology, psychometric rigor, and theoretical scope have attracted the attention of numerous scholars and researchers. Empirical investigations employing Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test of ego development (WUSCT) have appeared with increasing frequency and total more than 300 studies. Following the publication of the first comprehensive revision of the scoring manual for the WUSCT, this volume reflects on the strengths and limitations of Loevinger's developmental model. It is divided into sections that correspond with four broad questions that can be raised about Loevinger's developmental model:
* What is its scope and intellectual tradition?
* What evidence is there for construct validity?
* What is its relationship to other social-developmental models?
* What is its clinical relevance to Loevinger's model of ego development? This four-part grouping provides a framework for effectively organizing the present material, and frequently, the questions raised in one section are addressed in other sections as well. In the concluding chapter, Loevinger addresses some of the ideas that are proposed by the various authors. She also presents the origin of the ego development concept by recounting its history.

I

THE NATURE OF EGO DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER

1

Loevinger’s Theory of Ego Development and Its Relationship to the Cognitive–Developmental Approach

Augusto Blasi
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts—Boston

Even though Loevinger consistently places her work within the cognitivedevelopmental approach (e.g., Loevinger, 1987b), her theory of ego development does not fit neatly with the assumptions and methods of that tradition. In fact, her continuing interest in psychoanalysis, her use of the term ego, and her reliance on both psychoanalytic and cognitive concepts led some writers (e.g., Langer, 1969) to interpret her theory as one recent version of ego psychoanalysis.

In this chapter, I argue that Loevinger’s theory of ego development is not a variant of the cognitive–developmental approach, as this approach is usually understood. There is nothing magical or absolute about the distinctions on which I rely. A “lumping” strategy may indeed bring out interesting aspects of ego development theory. Here I adopt a “splitting” strategy, hoping to highlight those unique aspects of Loevinger’s thinking that cannot be reduced to either cognitive-developmentalism or psychoanalysis.

As used here, the term cognitve–developmentalism refers to the body of work begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainly by a group of researchers in the United States. These researchers recognized their distant and more recent roots in the ideas of J. M. Baldwin, G. H. Mead, and J. Piaget, but extended these ideas into the domain of social and personality development. As it turned out, this branch of the cognitive-developmental approach came to be overwhelmingly guided by Piaget’s theory. Perhaps one important factor in this theoretical turn was Kohlberg’s early work on moral development and his codification of the basic theoretical principles in Stage and Sequence (Kohlberg, 1969).

As applied to personality, cognitive-developmentalism found its inspiration in Piaget’s early work, including among its topics morality and interpersonal communication and having its unifying idea in egocentrism and perspective taking. However, its theoretical principles were borrowed, literally and without adaptation, from Piaget’s later theoretical formulations concerning the development of intelligence and logic.

This orientation came to be characterized by a number of pivotal ideas:

1. The concept of operations, namely, of mental strategies, abstracted from interactions with objects and people.

2. The concept of stage as an operational structure, namely, a structure that is characterized by rigorous compensatory transformations.

3. The idea of equilibrated interactions with the environment, out of which a series of increasingly adapted, broad, and stable structures are successively constructed. These structures would be related to each other according to a logic of implication and integration and, therefore, would be increasingly adequate.

4. The idea of universal development, deriving from the stages’ logical hierarchy and from the fact that the most basic features of objects and interactions are universal.

5. A final idea, not found in Piaget, but frequently used by Kohlberg and his collaborators (e.g., Snarey, Kohlberg, & Noam, 1983), concerns the necessary but not sufficient relations among several developmental dimensions.

Cognitive-developmentalism, in the sense described here, originated from and thrived on the expectation that logical operations, logic-like structures, and the principle of equilibration would give us the key to understand and explain the development of personality, that is, of social and interpersonal behavior, of interests and values, of self-control, and similar characteristics. After more than 30 years of work we can begin to assess this expectation. It cannot be denied that the cognitivedevelopmental approach contributed enormously to our knowledge of the ways people come to grasp a variety of concepts and ideas, including those of person and friendship, justice and altruism, religion, emotion and defense, normality and deviance. However, all of this may be related to, but is not yet, personality development. We hoped that personality could be found behind concepts and reasoning strategies, but behind concepts we found other, perhaps more sophisticated and complex, concepts.

Loevinger avoided this problem of bridging the gap between cognition and personality, because she entered cognitive-developmentalism with an already well-developed set of research questions and a series of observations. These had relatively little to do with concepts and reasoning, but concerned impulses and methods for controlling impulses, personal preoccupations and ambitions, interpersonal attitudes and social values—what psychologists normally call personality. Throughout her career she remained faithful to these matters and selected from Piagetian theory (or from psychoanalysis) what best suited her. On the other hand, what makes her theory a genuine theory of personality also makes it less of a cognitivedevelopmental theory. In what follows I build my argument by comparing Loevinger’s theory and the cognitive-developmental approach on three issues: the content of stages, the nature of structures, and the explanation of development. In a final section I sketch a theoretical interpretation of Loevinger’s stages centering on the motivation for mastery. This interpretation, although fully located within the domain of personality and personality development, involves certain features that make ego development similar in some respects to cognitive development.

THE CONTENT OF STAGES

One difficulty of extending cognitive-developmental theories to issues of personality and personality development is the difference betweeen the abstract nature of Piagetian operations and the essential concreteness of emotional and motivational processes. The former seem to be ill-suited to represent the latter.

But there is another, perhaps related difference between ego development and cognitive–developmentalism, concerning the perspective through which the content of the stages is approached. In all cognitive theories, Piagetian or otherwise, the focus is on the relations among objects (including people, relationships, personality traits, etc.): for example, two different beakers filled with water, different interactions among friends, an act of revenge and an act of justice. In all instances of cognitive grasp, one understands an aspect of reality by relating it to a set of similar and contrasting aspects. Of course, all these relations occur in a mind and are established by it. According to some theories, the mind (or the computer program) determines and limits the kind of relations that can be established among objects and the kind of objects that can be assimilated. But the mind is conceived as an impersonal ground, a “field,” on which these object-to-object relations occur. To indicate the combination of the assimilatory quality of the mind and its impersonality and objectivity, Piaget devised the concept of the epistemic subject which, in the ordinary sense of the term, is not a subject at all.

It is important for my argument to emphasize that this objective perspective is a characteristic of cognition as cognition. Whatever specific topic one may wish to study, the interest is in understanding objective reality—the relations among objects—even when these objects are our own actions, traits, and thoughts. Although it is normally accepted that personality frequently influences cognition, it is also taken for granted that the effect of personality characteristics can in principle be sorted out or compensated, so as to recover the impersonal structure of the world.

In ego development, by contrast, objects, people, and also the person’s own characteristics are approached specifically for the relations they have with the subject, namely, with the person’s needs, anxieties, interests, goals, and so on. Here the mind is not a field on which relations among objects are established, but a necessary pole of relations with every object. For instance, a person at the Conformist stage does not simply understand, in the manner of a dispassionate observer, that friends tend to trust each other and expect reciprocity from each other. Loevinger’s Conformist person is also able to transcend insecurity and selfish impulses in order to actually experience and value mutual trust.

There is no doubt that Loevinger’s ego developmental stages have these subject-to-object or subject-to-subject relations as elementary units or components. In her study of the Authoritarian Family Ideology, before she explicitly focused on ego development, Loevinger (1962) empirically derived three qualitatively different clusters of psychological characteristics, that could be considered (as she did) as her first rudimentary descriptions of ego stages. The traits comprising these clusters have little to do with cognition, but concern personal orientations and attitudes toward people and events. For instance, the middle cluster included fear of impulses, anxiety produced by instinctual material, and repressive strategies to deal with anxiety. Loevinger maintained this interpretation even after she rejected the psychoanalytic explanation of development in favor of a cognitive-developmental account.

As for her final version of ego development (e.g., Loevinger, 1976), Loevinger frequently organizes the characteristics of the stages along four dimensions, all dealing with personal orientations and investments. The first concerns impulse control and character development (which, incidentally, is not the same as moral reasoning, even though Loevinger tended to place Kohlberg’s work within this dimension); the second, interpersonal style, includes such traits as independence, manipulativeness, need to belong, and autonomy; the third dimension has to do with conscious preoccupations, where the emphasis is on “preoccupations.” Even the last one, cognitive style, is in fact less cognitive than its label may suggest, as it includes traits like tolerance of ambiguity and tendency (i.e., interest, motivation) toward objectivity.

One reason Loevinger located her stages within the cognitive–developmental tradition may be that they, like Piaget’s or Kohlberg’s, are defined in terms of basic meanings. In fact, striving for meaning may be the closest to a definition of ego development that Loevinger ever offered. But “meaning” is a highly analogical concept needing to be specified and clarified by its context. Piagetian or cognitive meanings and the meanings of ego stages do not differ so much for their content as for the type of relations that are established with their content.

The distinction between meaning and significance may be useful in clarifying the differences. Meaning (whether semantic, logical, physical, or psychological) is purely cognitive and, once more, consists of the relations between an object or event and other objects or events, as represented in concepts and theories. Significance is an entirely different matter and can only be established subjectively, namely, by the relations objects and events have with people’s interests, needs, values, in sum, with people’s lives. For instance, for a person at the Conscientious stage the manipulativeness and opportunistic tendencies of the Self-Protective individual is a meaningful behavior pattern, which, however, has little or no significance in his or her life.

This distinction is illustrated when comparing Piaget’s concept of object permanence and the concept of object constancy in psychoanalytic and object relations theories. Both concepts refer to the early differentiation of self and other. The former, however, is frequently seen in terms of the child’s organization of the spatial field and the coordination of his or her movements (e.g., Piaget, 1954). The latter is understood as a child’s affective relations to his or her internal representations of the loved parent, representations that are inevitably tied to conflicts, defenses, and distortions. Object constancy, as described by object relations theory, and not the Piagetian object permanence (at least not directly), is related to the child’s ability to develop beyond the Symbiotic stage of ego development.

Of course, personal significance and cognitive meaning are frequently related to each other in concrete individuals. Object constancy seems to require some kind of object permanence. A trusting participation in friendship most likely coexists with a similar understanding of friendship, whichever of the two achievements may precede and facilitate the other. However, even so, these two aspects of human functioning—cognitive understanding and personal significance—can be differentiated at an abstract conceptual level and, at times, also at the level of concrete behavior. Because of their conceptual differences, it makes sense to ask in what way the development of cognitive understanding influences ego development, or vice-versa.

Loevinger’s stages, like psychoanalytic stages, refer to certain kinds of significance. Even though the significance emphasized in psychoanalysis is different from the significance characterizing ego development, neither can be reduced to cognitive meanings. Because meaning and significance are distinct and irreducible to each other, we can ask about the significance of pursuing cognitive projects; and a psychologist, taking an objective perspective, can also ask about the meaning of ego development.

THE NATURE OF STRUCTURE

A different approach to the elements or units of a psychological organization also implies a different understanding of what a structure is. In elaborating his understanding of structure, frequently in contrast with the kind of mental organization that is described in psychoanalysis, Piaget (1970, 1985) relied on the structures of logic as real, and not simply analogical, models. He defined psychological cognitive structures, then, in terms of the sort of equilibrium that allows for rigorously equivalent compensatory transformations. This model was adopted by and became the trademark of cognitive-developmentalism, also in its extension to personality. Kohlberg’s notion of hard stage (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983) corresponds to it.

Other kinds of mental organizations (e.g., those described by psychoanalysis or other personality theories), although not fitting the Piagetian concept of structure, do include compensatory processes and certain forms of equilibrium. Any theory postulating clusters of traits and a minimal degree of dynamic stability also needs to postulate some compensatory processes. According to psychoanalysis, compensations are achieved through defense mechanisms.

There would be two main differences between personality (e.g., psychoanalytic) structures and the Piagetian ones. In the former, transformations could not be represented in rigorous logical terms. Moreover, and this is crucial, the principle of transformation and the criterion of equilibrium would not be cognitive, but perhaps would have to do with affective and motivational states, for instance, the satisfaction of impulses, the management of anxiety, or the maintainance of self-esteem.

In my view, Loevinger’s structures could theoretically be located somewhere between the cognitive–developmentalist and the psychoanalytic extremes. Therefore, Kohlberg was probably correct in considering Loevinger’s stages as “soft,” according to the meaning he gave to the hard-soft distinction. It would be a mistake, however, to take this label, as he did, as an evaluative criterion. The value of a theory depends, among other things, on whether it fits the nature of what it attempts to explain. This is precisely the point of my argument: Personality is a different kind of reality than the subject matter of cognitive theories.

Another important difference should be mentioned, specifically between ego developmental and cognitive structures, whether hard or soft. If it is true that the content of ego development consists of relations between the person-subject and the person’s emotions, interests, needs, values, and so on, rather than of object-to-object relations, then the structuring of ego developmental units is guided by self-consistency and not necessarily by logical coherence. Of course, there can be different principles of self-consistency as there can be different kinds of logic. Piaget understood the structures of cognitive stages as reflecting basically different logical principles. In an analogous way, one can try to understand the stages described by Loevinger by attempting to formulate, for each stage, the special principle of self-consistency that would maintain the same significance across its various manifestations.

THE EXPLANATION OF DEVELOPMENT

Like many others in the field of developmental psychology, Loevinger gave relatively little attention to the topic of what she called “trans-stage theory” (Loevinger, 1976, p. 418). In her 1976 book (especially pp. 418-425), taking a detached perspective, Loevinger briefly reviewed five different kinds of explanation given by various theorists and then argued that they are not mutually exclusive. However, a close reading reveals clear preferences, although perhaps not a theoretical commitment. In my view, her preferences are not congruent with a cognitive–developmental approach.

First of all, not only is equilibration presented as one of several possible explanations, but what is said about it is relatively brief and unspecific. Second, the main focus of Loevinger’s discussion is on two other principles. She labels the first dialectic of personal growth and relates it to the formulations of J. M. Baldwin, G. H. Mead, and S. Freud. According to this principle, the relationships one has with people are internalized and become parts of one’s personality or serve as models for one’s internal differentiation. The other explanation, expressed as the reversal of passive to active voice (see also Loevinger, 1966b), is derived from psychoanalytic theory: it suggests that mastery and self-control are achieved by the impulse to actively repeat what one had to tolerate passively. This barely sketched explanation for stage transitions and for the transformation of motives is less eclectic than it seems at first: Its center is occupied by the motivation for mastery, whereas Piagetian equilibration plays a minor role.

By contrast, cognitive-developmentalism in general, and not only Kohlberg, followed Piaget in adopting equilibration as the only central principle of development. As understood by Piaget, this principle seems to be uniquely suited to explain cognitive development. According to it, changes in one’s conceptual structure are motivated by contradictions between one’s present understanding and actual experience with reality and are guided by the twin requirement of achieving consistency with external reality and maintaining the logical coherence of the structure. Equilibration, therefore, makes the development of knowledge exclusively sensitive to its convergence wit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Contributions and Controversies
• Part I: The Nature of Ego Development
• Part II: Construct Validity
• Part III: Related Developmental Models
• Part IV: Clinical Implications
• Postscript
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index