"[5] The purpose of the book is primarily to give professional helpers (such as counselors, psychotherapists, and coaches) a broad, developmental framework for empathizing with their clients' different ways of making sense of their problems.
[10] Kegan described cultures of embeddedness in terms of three processes: confirmation (holding on), contradiction (letting go), and continuity (staying put for reintegration).
[15] The first is the humanistic and existential-phenomenological tradition (which includes Martin Buber, Prescott Lecky, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Ludwig Binswanger, Andras Angyal, and Carl Rogers).
[15] The second is the neo-psychoanalytic tradition (which includes Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Harry Guntrip, John Bowlby, and Heinz Kohut).
[15] The third is what Kegan calls the constructive-developmental tradition (which includes James Mark Baldwin, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, William G. Perry, and Jane Loevinger).
[22] Kegan argued, similarly to later theorists of asset-based community development, that professional helpers should base their practice on people's existing strengths and "natural" capabilities.
[23] The careful practice of "unnatural" (self-conscious) professional intervention may be important and valuable, said Kegan; nevertheless "rather than being the panacea for modern maladies, it is actually a second-best means of support, and arguably a sign that the natural facilitation of development has somehow and for some reason broken down".
[27] Despite the book's wealth of human stories, some readers have found it difficult to read due to the density of Kegan's writing and its conceptual complexity.
[34] In the last chapter, "On Being Good Company for the Wrong Journey", Kegan warns that it is easy to misconceive the nature of the mental transformations that a person needs or seeks to make.
[38] The book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work (2001), co-authored by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, jettisons the theoretical framework of Kegan's earlier books The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads and instead presents a practical method, called the immunity map, which is intended to help readers overcome an immunity to change.
[40] The immunity map continues the general dialectical pattern of Kegan's earlier thinking but without any explicit use of the concept of "evolutionary truces" or "orders of consciousness".
The immunity map primarily consists of a four-column worksheet that is gradually filled in by individuals or groups of people during a structured process of self-reflective inquiry.
[41] Kegan and Lahey progressively introduce each of the four columns of the immunity map in four chapters that show how to transform people's way of talking to themselves and others.
Kegan and Lahey also borrow and incorporate some frameworks and methods from other thinkers, including Ronald A. Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive learning,[46] Chris Argyris's ladder of inference,[47] and a reworded version of the four stages of competence.
[51] The book An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016) was co-authored by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, Matthew L. Miller, Andy Fleming, and Deborah Helsing.
Kegan, along with his fellow co-authors, explore the successful business practices that promote a culture where individual growth and personal satisfaction can flourish.
She claimed that Kegan fell victim to a cultural "myopia" that "perfectly reflects the rationalist values of modern academia".
"[1] In the 2009 book Psychotherapy as a Developmental Process by psychologists Michael Basseches and Michael Mascolo—a book which Kegan called "the closest thing we have to a 'unified field theory' for psychotherapy"[58]—Basseches and Mascolo said that they "embrace both Piagetian models of psychological change and their organization into justifications of what constitutes epistemic progress (the development of more adequate knowledge)".