Ego Processes in Adulthood: A Comment on Jane Loevinger

In her article, Loevinger argues for a developmentally based approach to personality assessment. In contrast to those (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1984; see Kogan, 1989) who have argued that personality dimensions are stable throughout adulthood, and perhaps even through all the life span, Loevinger constructed her model of ego development with the notion that adulthood may bring a series of transformations in cognitive complexity that may be critical to understanding adaptive processes. This view has a long history, of course, as it is in the tradition of the "grand" psychoanalytic ap proaches to development. However, it has been less influential in the field of a more cognitively oriented approach to adult adaptation, although recently there have been many calls for a cognitive-developmental reinterpretation of psychoanalytic accounts of development. In my way of thinking, Loevinger's work occupies a central position in that movement and prefigures it in many respects. Following Piaget, cognitive-developmental psychologists have long held that an overwhelming share of the variance in child, adolescent, and adult adaptive processes may be accounted for by the fact that individuals of different developmental levels organize their experience in profoundly different ways. Following Piaget, too, they have steered away from some of the more exotic claims of how this process is to be accounted for. It is part of the reason for the success of Loevinger's work that she, too, has not engaged in the more fanciful claims originating from psychoanalysis (such as the notion that distinct character structures emanate from the different psychosexual stages). Instead, she adopted a view that is more compatible with cognitive-developmental accounts-particularly, the work of Kohlberg (e.g., Kohlberg, 1984). In retrospect, this proves to have been a wise course, both from a methodological and a heuristic perspective. On the methodological side, Loevinger has provided us with an eminently workable instiument which combines several advantages. It is based on qualitative coding and thus permiits a rich view of the differences in developmental complexity that characterize different protocols. It also has the important features of being highly trainable and of achieving interrater reliability in fairly short time periods, given the complexity of the instrument. Furthermore, as Loevinger points out, the instrument has achieved a remarkable track record of validity. These methodological advantages have proved invaluable for those developmental psychologists, like myself, who work with adults rather than children. In that age continuum, it is widely believed, adaptive processes and their progressive or regressive development appear to become quite uncoupled from age per se. Researching developmental processes in adulthood, therefore, makes the availability of an index of developmental level other than age an essential requirement if one wants to find coherent patterns of development. On the heuristic side, Loevinger's conception of ego stages has spawned a multitude of studies examining aspects of ego development across the life span. At the same time, her work has influenced the more theoretical efforts of many individuals working in the field of adult developmental processes, including this writer. In my own work, it was Loevinger's measurement procedure that drew me to her conceptualization of ego levels; but since, it has become obvious that her method implies an enormously integrative, if often implicit, view of the transformation of adaptive processes in adulthood. Of course, the developmental view of adult adaptation is not the only, or even the most widely accepted, perspective from which to examine adulthood. A good deal of tension is often constellated in the field around different views of adaptation in adulthood. One major competing view (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1984) holds that personality in adulthood is organized around five major personality dimensions that may develop early in life, or even be inherited, and that change little, if at all, during adulthood. The second major alternative to the developmental position holds that there is contextual variability in adaptational outcomes and that any age variance is only secondary to changes in context (see Labouvie-Vief, Hakim-Larson, & Hobart, 1987). Our own working assumption has been that these different views can offer complementary rather than contradictory approaches. Let me first turn to a discussion of developmental transformations. Take, for example, a result from our study of coping and defense processes in preadolescents, adolescents, and adults (Labouvie-Vief et al., 1987). In that study, we found that one of the coping scales, Seeking Social Support, was unrelated to age or developmental complexity (although it was related to sex of the respondent). At the same time, however, our qualitative data indicated that the reasons why individuals seek social support are vastly different at different levels of developmental complexity. At more conformist levels, individuals primarily seek social support because they seem fearful that their affective states might not find group approval. Thus, a level of symbiotic functioning is evident here,