Integral Naked 05.21.07 - Telling the Story of Development with Susanne Cook-Greuter

Telling the Story of Development. Part 1. Zürich to Cambridge. (37:00)
Susanne Cook-Greuter and Ken Wilber

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One of the most important developmental psychologists working today shares her path from a working-class family in Switzerland to academic excellence and innovation at Harvard University, exploring the higher stages of consciousness available to us all.

Who: Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter, founding member of I-I and Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate who has taken the pioneering developmental work of Jane Loevinger to important new heights, and Ken Wilber, author of Integral Psychology and Integral Spirituality, two seminal texts exploring the finer points of truly Integral human development.

Relevance: One of the concepts that make an Integral Approach more than a merely two-dimensional map of reality is its deep understanding of the developmental nature of human growth and unfolding. Failing to take into account the developmental aspect of interior growth is to guarantee a profoundly inadequate mode of relating to your fellow man and woman. Susanne is at the leading tip of scholars and researchers actively exploring and documenting this crucial dimension of human experience.

Summary: How did a young girl growing up in Switzerland, where only boys were encouraged to go to high school—let alone university—end up working with some of the finest minds in the world at the Harvard Graduate School of Education? As Susanne and Ken joke, perhaps it had something to do with being born on a street called “Philosopher’s Path.” However it happened, that path led her straight to HGSE, home to Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan, Kurt Fischer, Howard Gardner, and Jane Loevinger, probably the single greatest concentration of developmental studies “greats” you’ll find anywhere—most of whom are either founding members of I-I, or good friends.

Susanne has taken Jane Loevinger’s work with tracing ego development, or how individuals understand themselves and their own self-identity, and has quite literally taken it to new heights (for the details on this, see Scholar’s Notes). Developmental studies tracks how growth or actualization hierarchies appear in human beings, and the secret to this particular game is understanding that growth hierarchies are what is necessary to eliminate dominator or pathological hierarchies—the higher an individual is on a psychological growth hierarchy, the more inclusive, embracing, caring, conscious, and compassionate that individual is going to be (rather than repressive, domineering, and authoritarian, which are characteristic of lower levels of development). The fact that Susanne is mapping and elucidating some of these higher stages of consciousness growth and evolution is really quite a significant achievement, and contributes directly to how each of us—you and I—can reach towards and manifest our own highest possibilities, “telling the story of development” in our own lives….

keywords: developmental studies, Creativity, Spirituality, and Transcendence, University of Zürich, Switzerland, Harvard University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan, Kurt Fischer, Howard Gardner, Jane Loevinger, Harry Lasker, Sentence Completion Test (SCT), Loevinger’s stages of ego development (symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, individualistic, autonomous, integrated—with Susanne “adding on” construct-aware, ego-aware, transpersonal), Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, structure-stages, state-stages, Integral Spirituality, Integral Psychology, Integral Training, Charles “Skip” Alexander, Transcendental Meditation (TM), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "What Is Integral?," A Theory of Everything.

most memorable moment: "School was the one place where I felt seen for who I was. But my parents didn’t even think that I should go to high school, because girls prepared for marriage… and that was it."

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