Savanah Gray

“It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities. It is comforting for us to think that, in totalitarian societies, where troublesome people are often psychiatrically hospitalized, the indigenous mental health professionals are themselves aware that their behavior is nakedly political and actually aimed at social control rather than the health of the person. Bus what is the possibility that American mental health workers are themselves vulnerable to what amounts to the goals of adjustment couched in notions of health, and which lead to equal - and probably equally unwitting - exercises of social control?”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Depression characterized by the 'threat-to' orientation lodges itself in one side of the proposition. Doing so does not eliminate doubt, it only places it in the world. The world has become doubtful; what I doubt is my capacity to continue living in such a world. I doubt whether I can make it given how things are. I experience a kind of shrinking, or diminution of my self; but what remains clear - what I am most wanting to hold clear - is who it is that is doing the doubting, who 'I' am. As it seems to 'me,' what 'I' doubt is whether, in the face of the way the world has become, 'I' can keep myself together, my self together. From the point of view of our paradigm, that which 'I' say means: I doubt whether I can keep it together, this balance. What is being doubted, really, from our point of view, is the capacity to continue knowing, which, phenomenologically, from the view of the self, entails the capacity to continue being.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“What is self and what is other may be a question of the person's 'biology,' but it is equally a question of the person's 'philosophy': what is the subject-object relationship the person has become in the world?
That question suggests at least two things...First, subject-object relations become; they are not static; their study is the study of a motion. Second, subject-object relations live in the world; they are not simply abstractions, but take form in actual human relations and social contexts.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“The struggle of the sexes to know each other, to see each other, and to communicate deeply - a struggle which may be more a feature of adult life in the West than at any time in the past - may rest in the capacity of men and women to learn the universal language they share, an evolutionary esperanto, the dialectical context in which these two poles are joined. It may rest in their recognition that neither differentiation nor integration is prior, but that each is a part of the reality of being alive.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development