Stages of Ego Development 1

Stages of Ego Development

By: Tammy Poe
PSY 230
Axia University of Phoenix
June 10, 2010







Stages of Ego Development 2

Jane Loevinger viewed the ego as the striving to master, to integrate, and to make sense of
experience. Each person synthesizes or puts together our experience as our own. The process of
selfhood- this sense of the ego or I as an active interpreter of experience- changes in significant
ways over the course of our lives. Loevingers cognitive developmental paradigm views an
individual as an active knower who structures experience in more adequate and complex ways.
Development is viewed as progression through hierarchical stages.
Early stages must be mastered before subsequent stages can be approached. Each stage builds
on its predecessor and ultimately encompasses all that comes before it. Movement from one
stage to the next is a complex product of both internal maturation and external forces, which are
in constant reciprocal interaction. Higher stages of development are better than lower ones,
providing how one interprets structures for worlds more differentiated, integrated, and adequate.
Each stage is designated with a name such as the impulsive stage.
Each stage provides an overall framework of meaning that the person tries to make sense of
the world. The framework of meaning can be understood in three specific areas; impulse control,
interpersonal mode, and conscious preoccupations. In other words, as one moves from lower to
higher stages, the ego becomes less the slave if immediate impulses and more a flexible agent
that operates according to internalized standards of conduct. Interpersonally, the person moves
from egocentrism through conformity to relative autonomy and mutual interdependence. As one
matures, the issues that preoccupy the persons consciousness becomes less concerned with body
and appearance and more focused on the internal life of feelings and fantasies as well as
internalized goals and plans.
Stages of Ego Development 3

Infants and young children cannot take the test because the test is a sentence-completion test,
and the test requires verbal ability. Most theories of self assume that an infant is born without a
sense of self-as-subject. Allport (1955) suggested that an early sense of self develops out of basic
bodily experiences in the first year. Studies on infants between ages 5 and 24 months, employing
measures such as attention, emotional displays, play, using a mirror to find objects, pointing at
themselves, and labeling the self. The child self is the progressive movement from egocentric
impulsivity to sociocentric conventionality.
The child views the world to be simple, concrete, one-dimensional, and quite selfish. By the
age of 9 or 10, the ego becomes more sophisticated and socialized structure for interpreting the
world. The adolescent develops in the direction of conformity and celebrates it sameness with
other selves, the selfs movement through adolescence and into young adulthood is believed to
be in the opposite direction. The adult ego cam become a prodigiously complex and
sophisticated framework for making sense of the world. Loevingers highest stage of ego
development celebrates the synthesizing power of the adult ego. Loevinger believed that most
adult fall short of the selfs highest levels.




References
Pinel. (2007). Retrieved 9, June 2010.