Robert Kegan

Robert Kegan (born August 24, 1946) is an American developmental psychologist and author. He was the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught for forty years until his retirement in 2016. Additionally he was the Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the Co-director for the Change Leadership Group. He is a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures widely to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development.

Born in Minnesota, Kegan attended Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude in 1968. He has described the civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War as formative experiences during his college years. He took his "collection of interests in learning from a psychological and literary and philosophical point of view" to Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1977.

In his book The Evolving Self (1982), Kegan explores human life problems from the perspective of a single process which he calls meaning-making, the activity of making sense of experience through discovering and resolving problems. "Thus it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making," Kegan says. Meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and can evolve in complexity through a series of "evolutionary truces" (or "evolutionary balances") that establish a balance between self and other (in psychological terms), or subject and object (in philosophical terms), or organism and environment (in biological terms). Each evolutionary truce is both an achievement of and a constraint on meaning-making, possessing both strengths and limitations. And each evolutionary truce presents a new solution to the lifelong tension between how people are connected, attached, and included, on the one hand (integration), and how people are distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other (differentiation).

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