Pre-Conventional Stages of Ego Development by Cook-Greuter (#161)

0:00Hi everyone, welcome to the Deep Psychology Podcast. I am your host, Ross Edwards, four-time author, humanistic, existential coach and host of the Deep Psychology Podcast. Today we are talking about pre-conventional ego development continuing on with our in-depth September series on Coug Reuters, Ego Development Theory. So this really is a continuation of last week's episode and it's a crucial key, crucial piece of the entire ego development puzzle. When we say pre-conventional ego development, we basically mean the lower tail of the developmental bell curve. Most people aren't at pre-conventional levels, most adults aren't because they grow beyond it. It's normal for young children to be here and although they usually grow beyond it and if you

1:03find adults at pre-conventional levels often they are they cannot fully look after themselves and are not fully integrated into ordinary society. These stages are stages of low ego complexity, autonomy, freedom, flexibility, self-awareness and skill in interacting with the environment. It represents pre-adult, pre-civilized, pre-ego, pre-socialized stages and you likely moved through all these stages way before, possibly primary school, certainly before high school, most people move through them and by the time you're done you'll be into conventional levels of development. So today we're going to really dig deep into these pre-conventional levels. Just want to say before I get going that I have new long-form episodes like this every Wednesday with snippets on Thursday, Sunday and Tuesday, always at 9pm central European time,

2:108pm UK time and 3pm eastern time. Make sure to subscribe on Apple or Spotify and if you want to go deeper with this work you can join my fortnightly newsletter, pre-order my latest book, The Boundless Body or try a free coaching session with me, links are in the description for all of those and I would really encourage you to listen to the entire Eagle Development series from this month which I'll also link to in the description if you want to get a really complete overview of Eagle Development Theory which comes from Susan Cook-Greuter. This is what you really want to listen to and I would also encourage as I did last week you go and listen, you go and read Susan Cook-Greuter's 9 levels paper to accompany these audios on my fetus search. Susan Cook-Greuter 9 levels you will probably find her paper on this subject

3:12on the internet. Before we get going just want to mention my sponsor Spiritt Quest tours which take small groups on exclusive Sacred Journeys to Egypt, Peru and Turkey. Get 500 dollars off your next trip by using the discount code Ross on the booking page linked below. All right let's get going with pre-conventional Eagle Development so one thing you might be wondering is Ross why are we learning about pre-conventional Eagle Development if most adults aren't here. We usually go through them by the time we're in primary school and they seem really far removed from ordinary adult life and functioning. Yes indeed you you may have these doubts however if you're having these doubts just listen to what I'm going to say because you might be surprised. First of all these stages describe how you wear as an infant. We all go through these

4:17stages we all start as ground zero and we develop through them even if we get very to very late levels of Eagle Development we start out here so that's fascinating because you literally were you literally went through these stages and if you look back to the very early years of your life well you can see the dominance of these stages and you can realize just how different you are now now that you've gone through them all. They also help you understand what conventional development is built on because if you understand pre-conventional development it gives you a contrast you can understand better what conventional development actually means it's really easy to take conventional development for granted when actually you know we is something we have to develop you know conventional development often just seems like ordinary adulthood and even I will describe it like that because that's effectively what it is but

5:22when you think of it like that you can take it for granted when actually there's a lot that needs to happen for a person to reach conventional adulthood you'll also grasp grasp grasp clearly the difference between pre and post-conventional development this is a really big point right here if you're if you're post-conventional and you'll know exactly what that means by the end of this month you make confused post-conventional for pre-conventional because in some respects especially the highest stages of post-conventional development they might seem like the very early stages of pre-conventional development but what you'll realize is actually they're very very different like so unbelievably different it's just that when you've not really studied these things you might not quite appreciate the great differences

6:25that are around between them like you often hear like meditation masters talking about babies in a kind of reverential way as though babies were enlightened now I'm not saying they necessarily think babies are enlightened right because I think they probably realize that being enlightened and being a baby are quite different but still it's like they they don't quite realize exactly what being a baby means and there's very good evidence for what being a baby means right and that's what we're going to cover and so you're going to understand the difference between being highly developed and very low having very low development which is a distinction that a lot of people struggle to make which is quite surprising but it genuinely happens it also help you understand the children and infants should deal with because children and I mean listen all stages of development are

7:27inhabiting different worlds right but when you're dealing with children and infants especially consume like they're in a really really different world so studying these things theoretically will help you grasp what what they're actually what their life is like from their point of view okay that will help you it doesn't necessarily mean it'll be smooth sailing but you'll maybe understand better how to deal with children and infants and also because these levels are still active in you they're still available to you they're still part of your repertoire this is something I really emphasize last week that levels are like the stages of ego development they like an expanding spiral so they build on top of one another or they're like Russian dolls you know the the biggest Russian doll contains the next biggest which contains the next biggest which ultimately contains

8:28the smallest and that's really the same as you you know even if you're far far beyond pre-conventional ego development it's still there it's like you can still operate from it and you still do operate from it right these are like the base levels of your psyche this is like the you know if you're constructing a bay like a card a house a card or a building like these are the foundations of your entire mind so it might be useful to know what the foundations of your mind actually are and a lot of it's not pretty unfortunately um and listen in periods of in moments of stress or periods of stress you know whether it's an argument or whether it's something more lasting like you lose your job and you have to go through unemployment for example in these times I'm not going to say you necessarily go down to a specific level but I'm just going to say in general you go

9:31down to sort of pre-conventional type levels you know you really your psyche changes and you become a lot more you feel more threatened in your actions and your behavior often um match that okay so I want you to notice in these times that these primal these more primal basic levels appear and I want you to make the connection between what I'm talking about here like the exact details that we're going to cover and what you are like in those moments okay so that's really the biggest reason for me is that these are just these are levels of functioning that you still have it's not you're not necessarily there all the time like most of the time you won't be if you're listening to this listen I'm assuming you're probably not a pre-conventional adult but you know they're certainly still there and you still use them and you should still use them in certain circumstances so what actually is pre-conventional eagle development from like a bigger point of view

10:36before we talk about the stages I think we need to really understand what's the big picture here so what's basically happening is when we're born we start ground zero in eagle development we don't have an eagle we don't have we don't have any self referencing which in other words we don't we don't refer anything back to ourselves at all like you know you you look at your mom and you don't refer your mom back to yourself you just see your mom you don't have any interpretations you're not interpreting the world on any in any level and you don't have any meaning making capacity you don't take your experience and construct meaning around it which is really what eagle development is all about is how we do that in ever more complicated ways so we're going from that we're basically going from having no mind as opposed you could say to conventional eagle development you know once we go through pre-conventional we get to conventional which in broad terms meaning means that there's a genuine subject object split in other words we have

11:43we recognize our body and our mind are our own and the rest of the world around us is not us the world the the the the desk is not us the coffee machine is not us the wall is not us other people are not us that's the subject object split um the way we interpret reality at conventional levels is in line with the demands and expectations of society we have conventional meaning making in other words like the way we think about what life actually means is is a convention you know it's it's sort of acceptable to the majority okay so you can think you know that is pre pre-conventional is going from zero zero eagle to having all of that so this is like like pre-convent going through pre-conventional successfully actually gets you to being like functional civilized adult right so

12:45this is no big this is no big deal I was about to say this is no um this is a big deal like this is for most people this is all the development they go through in life most of most of the development they go through is it's just this so um that's kind of the big picture of it we go from zero eagle to conventional eagle pre-conventional eagle development describes the normal stages of child development up until children become socialized they learn the rules they have impulse control they can cooperate um they can fulfill responsibility to a certain degree they have a functional moral sense and so on and so forth so they're sort of like they might still be young but they're essentially like civilized and they understand that they need to cooperate and the you know they they can um live an ordinary life without having to be fully dependent on adults right so

13:50again that's a big deal if we're looking at from the children the point of view of child development it's a huge deal for children to go through pre-conventional like it's the first 10 to 15 years of a child's life um however there is no guarantee that a child will complete post-conventional sorry pre-conventional development and in fact there's a there's a you know a significant chunk of adults that do not complete pre-conventional development at all ever and these people often require care and guardianship or they are um they're not very well like socialized they find it hard to to function properly and at pre-conventional we are yet like this is true of all the pre the three pre-conventional stages where you're going to cover are yet to develop a true second person perspective which basically means that we cannot see another person as a person with their own

14:55life their own needs their own life story their own life you know their own challenges their own desires and so forth we cannot see another person with any great um complexity or detail right so so that's like that's how basic these levels are if you can do that then I'm asking you to kind of imagine that you can't do that and that is what pre-conventional is you literally are not capable of taking the perspective of another person in a genuine way free of your own biases and your own needs okay the pre-conventional levels are the beginning of the construction of the separate self your own self identity and this peaks at the achiever level so with the achiever level by the ways a conventional level so you can think of the pre-conventional as like the first ascent of our like the building of our mind and our identity as a human like from nothing from

16:01note from from no identity from no mind from no ego we're built where this is like the first phase of that excuse me the first phase of that now just take that in for a moment like you're born with zero identity zero sense of self another you look around you can't tell the difference between your body and the room you can't speak you you don't understand what time is you don't understand what the external world is in any functional way you have like no capacity you can't even walk you can't move when we're well you can move but very that hardly you're dependent on on everyone around you from that we get someone who's like a civilized adult who can look after themselves enough to kind of function in society that is like that that is staggering and it's something we

17:02often don't think about very much we only often think about it when we're around babies who can't do the most basic things but I want you to realize that you went through this and also it's not just a physical thing and it's not just about skills it's actually the your entire psyche grows along with all the skills and all the capacities you develop you know to walk to talk to relate to people and so on and so forth another crucial insight the final crucial insight before we cover the stages is that in general you know yeah pretty much we can say that pre-conventional at pre-conventional we have very little choice over our behavior like self-awareness is very low reflection is very low our ability to kind of look at our behavior objectively our ability to take in feedback from other people is just extremely limited so

18:13that is like wow that is it's quite mind-blowing just to like realize that this is like a genuine limitation you cannot choose how you behave really um the ability to really choose how to behave only comes on to any real degree at conventional and then it increases through post-conventional it's really just uh it's a dimension on a variable that increases as with equal development okay but whenever we're you know whenever we're talking about these stages the eyes that like there is this is very odd these things are vet these are these stages are very automatic quite they're very driven by impulse they're driven by needs and desires they're not really thinking very far ahead and as I said they they cannot reflect on themselves to any real level so the stages of pre-conventional development there's three of them and they are

19:15called whether three of them in co-greyter's model they are called symbiotic impulsive and opportunistic you're going to understand why they're called these once we've done describing them and symbiotic is number one impulsive is number two an opportunistic is two slash three so notice that the first two are whole numbered stages and then there's a slash stage um we'll talk about why that is when we get to opportunistic um but this is not like the rest of this co-greyter model the stages don't appear like that they appear whole number slash whole number slash it's just for these three if you're really interested in the geeky theory it goes whole whole slash and then we're back to like alternate so let's get going with talking about these stages in detail just before we do that quick mention of my sponsor spirit quest tours which take small groups on exclusive

20:22sacred journeys to Egypt to Peru and Turkey get five hundred dollars off your next trip by using the discount code Ross on the booking page linked below cool let's talk about stage one which is symbiotic it's called symbiotic so we're born when we're born as humans basically what we what researchers think happens and there's plenty of evidence for it is it we're born undifferentiated which basically means that we have our senses um we have our sense of sight our sense of sound our sense of touch you know these things develop but we have them to a certain degree but these things all of the phenomena generated by those in other words the entire world we experience we do not experience it um to be separated out in any way and this includes the people that

21:27are around us like our caregivers like our mom or dad possibly are sibling at that age um we are fused with them like we literally do not perceive any difference between us and them you look at your mother as a very young baby and there's no sense that that is your mother and the thing that is looking at your mother is you like there is no that just does not exist it's something it has to um develop over time so no surprise them and this is something we spoke about last week the importance of perspective taking um the perspective taking at this level is basically there is no perspective taking we call it the zero person perspective because there's no self there's no other there's a complete fusion with the senses the environment around you other people so you cannot take a perspective on anything because to take a perspective there needs to be a

22:31sense of self and a sense of other at minimum like that that needs to happen so this is zero person perspective this is reflected in the the language used by infants at this stage there's only very basic references to self to world to objects often it's pointing often it's like they look at things but they don't they can't label them um again no perspective taking is happening Susan Gräuter says that the actions available at this stage are called nominal actions which sounds very theoretical to me what I'm assuming is that it's basically just what's available is basic and court uncoordinated behavior like there's a little control over the body there's a little control um of motor skills and so on and so forth at this stage which kind of adds to the

23:31the oceanic feel of it right in terms of meaning making you know this whole model is about meaning making here we are basically learning to identify as a self like we're we basically do not have a sense of self at this stage so you can basically forget meaning making because meaning making is always relative to the self like with meaning making as a spoke last week what we do is we we we take all the information from the world around us it's coming in and according to our level of ego development we um package it and we construct meaning around it in such a way that makes sense to the self at that level but here there is no self right so there's really no meaning making going on um it's normal for infants up to you know six months a year 18 months in adults this stage is

24:35very very rare um adults at this stage are usually institutionalized or they're completely dependent on caregivers because they cannot really use language at all they're fused with the environment they can't see other people as having as people with their own wives and their own desires and their own um do you own things and there's no real sense of time so this is like completely prior to ordinary independent adult function okay um in terms of usual child development covers um development that occurs between birth and the beginning capacity for language to see it in adults you're not going to see it often but think of like non-verbal adults like maybe it's someone with like a severe uh disability or a severe like mental dysfunction or an old person who is um you know in a bad state it's really it's not pretty at all but it's important that we cover

25:41this because you could we take our development completely for granted we take all of the things that this stage lacks we take it for granted and what I want you to realize is that this stage is almost like base human awareness this is like the basic experience of being human like without idealizing it without saying that these people are enlightened or anything but just saying like this is like ground zero of being human like this is the most basic okay and on top of this everything else is built so to sum up it's normal for infants to be here normal for them to have no sense of self whatsoever to not be able to use language to not have a world view to not have a meaning-making capacity and so on and so forth adults here really cannot function at all

26:42now let's move on stage two it's called the impulsive stage okay this is a really big move in particularly in child development this is when the first person perspective appears for the first time as I said stage one the symbiotic stage where we're just symbiotically merged or fused with everything around us um it's it doesn't have a sense of self at all it's a zero person perspective stage two is a first person perspective because there's never a sense of self the self is now differentiated enough from the environment such that the person can now say I they can say me they can say mine they they can refer to themselves physically like their body their most basic impulses so it's not like a complex nuanced sense of self but the person

27:42probably looks at the table that they're sitting at and realizes it to enough of an extent that the table is not them and that their body is them right they might also look at other people and realize that the other person is looking at them okay they're they're not just you know the other person is not them and the other person is also looking at them so it's like a bit no there's a there's a bit of sense of self another here and they also might look at you know just any object to random and realize that okay that isn't really me whereas before stage one that the infant or the adult didn't realize that so it's a rudimentary sense of self another you wouldn't call this um and like an adult sense of self another but you know it's something um what I find interesting is that the self other and having a sense of identity is actually necessary for language like

28:48when you don't have a sense of self at least a pre-conventional ego development a post-conventional this changes a bit but a pre-conventional is necessary like self and other and the function the capacity for language develop together because listen you can't understand what you means or what I means if you don't have a sense of self another because someone could tell you like that is you and I'm me but if you don't perceive any separation between you and them that won't make any sense to you at all because it won't feel like they're they're actually making a distinction again these things are really hard to like grasp if you're not a pre-conventional but the basic point I'm trying to make is like just realize that things like language and things like self and other and things like how we use our body and how we see the world render us these things are all intertwined okay they facilitate each other right so that's why we're talking about these

29:54different aspects because I really want to understand like the the architecture of these stages this person can realize when they need something um whereas before at stage one like babies obviously have needs but they cannot name their needs and they as far as we know there is no real sense of ownership of the need you know they might feel that they're hungry for example but there's no like there's no sense they they they can't label it hunger they don't really know what the sense of hunger is they feel the hunger and there's there is a reaction like the baby might start crying um and then when you know the mother starts feeding it well it will feed but this as far as we know it's all very automatic whereas at stage two it's more conscious you know it's we can't really call this a very self-aware stage but you know they've recognized when they need something

30:59the only thing is they don't have much of a sense of time yet so they need it they need there needs to be met and now right they need it now so it's this stage is a bit immediate gratification hence the word impulsive they also don't actually have much of an idea of how to get what they want because again the world view is very simple the mind is very very simple um and there's also just little very little impulse control so it just acts out its needs so it's it's aware and it can kind of name what it wants and it can say i mean mine and it can say no and yes so you know it's expressing needs to some degree but it's very rudimentary still so there's a first person perspective but you know and there's like physical differentiation in other words the body is differentiated but they cannot really work at people and understand that they are own people

32:02they are their own people with their own needs still the other people are just seen as means to one's own needs so if they meet my needs they are good if they don't meet my needs they are bad magical ideas prevail and there's a sense of unlimited power because the perspective is egocentric so the world and self are still pretty fused um you know as I said things like the body might be differentiated enough to say i mean mine and to understand what that means but like in terms of action in terms of logic in terms of time in terms of desire these things aren't really differentiated out yet okay so it's still very egocentric and magical thinking prevails meaning that basically with magical thinking things you think of things as though they were like merged together so you in magical thinking you might imagine like a piece of broccoli or a piece of let's say

33:07a piece of chocolate because that's something you may actually want you imagine a piece of chocolate and you sort of confuse that with having it and you sort of mistake thinking about something and wanting something and sensing something is actually having something which seems strange but this is why i'm saying the cities levels are very basic adults at a stage are highly governed by their impulses and their needs if these are not met the adult has little means to cope beyond crying screaming or withdrawing they are easily easily overwhelmed and they can easily feel abandoned and so unsurprisingly they really cannot navigate adult life very well um they need care and they need guardianship so you know just to give you an example if you um if you if you're an adult at this stage and you know all of a sudden you feel hungry and other

34:15people are busy they can't help you right now they need to give me 10 minutes to help you you don't understand that like you don't understand that if they say no and they're not going to help you get food you're not going to cope with that so this is why people at this stage cannot navigate adult life because obviously for one thing if you're an adult you can take care of your own hunger most of the time um and if someone couldn't help you with that you would just be like well okay and you'd go and do it yourself see there's just not like the the machinery the mental machinery there's not the capacity required to build a look after yourself here so as I said there's first person perspective they can look in one direction in other words they can identify their own needs their own desires to some degree but only in one direction so there is no real um there is no real second person perspective yet so this is progress you know there's

35:19there's enough of a sense of self but still very little in the grand scheme of things um they see things in simple dichotomies good or bad queen or dirty nice or mean there's a very vague sense of linear time so they can't really plan or delay gratification or delay their impulses or plan for the future or remember the past there's like not really a sense of time in the usual sense there's a constant sense of that because basically their whole thing is about getting their needs met and they don't have much input into how that happens and so you know it's like the world is either with them or it's against them the world is impinging on their needs constantly meaning making again very limited because um not much of a sense of self not much like concept conceptual thinking going on so like you cannot form a complex view of the world and a

36:23complex meaning system yet meaning if it has any meaning here meaning is basically how well are my needs being met right now and that is what life is about it's really as simple as that okay so we're going to move on to stage two slash three which is called self-protective opportunistic before I do that just want to quickly mention my sponsor spirit quest tours which take small groups on exclusive sacred journeys to Egypt Peru and Turkey get 500 dollars off your next trip by using the discount code Ross on the booking page linked below all right let's move on to stage two slash three which is called self-protective opportunistic I'm not going to call it self-protective opportunistic um I'll explain why it has both those labels but I think I'll just call it two

37:23slash three to keep it simple so this is actually a really sort of big move I mean all stage transitions are a big move but this one is you know it's something we can can highlight um this is the first stage of differentiation so as I said it's a slash stage which means it's a stage of differentiation whereas whole number stages are stages of integration now what it means in this context is that the individual moves away from complete dependence on their caregiver so it's kind of like a move apart or a move away from what they had before which was just complete dependence um this is when the child can start to satisfy their own needs they can sort of move around more they understand better how the world works and so on and so forth it's still quite basic but it's a first move away um this is a first stage in the model where we can

38:31really be functional adults so there's a significant chunk of the adult population here particularly in poorer more dangerous countries but certainly it's not limited to such countries there's plenty of people operating from stage two slash three in developed countries I think the figure that Susan Cooke-Greuter gives is around 10% are at two slash three this is the advanced first person perspective or we could call it first second person perspective or first person perspective with a beginning second person perspective so basically what I'm saying is that it's not purely first person but it's also not really a true second person perspective because well we'll get to that there's a sense there's a stronger and more coherent sense of self um particularly emotionally you're more in touch with um there's the

39:35self is there's more emotions there's stronger emotions and your emotions are now differentiated enough that you realize that your emotions are not another person's emotions and you need to not another person's needs and your wants don't necessarily coincide with other people's wants okay so this is when we for the first time in our entire life we sense that other people actually have their own needs and wants um which is it's quite fascinating that did not exist until two slash three it simply does not exist at the hourware levels you cannot we call their people and realize they have their own needs and wants and you really barely look at their people as their their own person anyway however as yet there is no real empathy with others there's no real ability to coordinate with them or to cooperate with them and really you see others people who's other people as threats as competitors because you see yourself as having your own needs and wants

40:40and you've for the first time realize that other people have them so it can be very threatening there's still quite a limited sense of time um and there's a limited sense of how your actions have consequences here magical thinking remains in our words like conceptual thinking logical thinking is still pretty much an unexistent and there's little perception of standard cause and effect like you don't really understand how your behavior has consequences give you the world as a kind of jungle it's like me and my needs versus others and their needs so it's like a battle of wells or a zero-some game um this is common in children around age of two before they go to nursery or kindergarten this is when you'll see them having tantrums you'll see them starting to become deceitful they'll have very little still have very little emotional regulation they'll have stronger emotions like anger but they still don't have

41:43their ability to regulate the anger um and you cannot really reason with them like in vain because they they understand everything in terms of their own needs and they just see you as someone who's getting in the way of their own needs so adults at this stage know how to get what they want to some degree and they simply see other people as the obstacle to what they want okay so their own wants and desires are primary to all of us to all others so they can resort to manipulation control and self-protection in order to get their needs met um you know and from their perspective it's totally normal like at later stages of legal development we internalize the fact that you know you can't just manipulate and control people as you want because other people have their own needs and they might feel upset and they might um last back at you if you do that and there's rules

42:48against that and so on see this stage doesn't really understand that and from its own perspective because literally the entire world is just filtered through their own views well they it just seems normal inside that cool this is what I can do I can manipulate people control people etc etc and I'm sure you know adults that basically this is their life and I'm sure you yourself manipulating control people as well so we're starting to get to like aspects of human life that we can understand I'm not saying you're always at stage two or stage two three but you will you can understand it enough and you'll regress to it enough that you'll see when you yourself are operating from here there are two versions of this stage one is called the opportunistic and the other is called the self-protective now both essentially see the world in the same way and they basically make meaning the same way in our words they see the world as a jungle and the meaning of

43:53life is basically to get my needs met however the opportunistic person tends to be on like the winning side of that equation so in the jungle life they tend to be winning in terms like they maybe have physical strength so they can overpower people maybe they have manipulation skills maybe they can they have like alliances with other people that they can call on so they they're sort of on the winning side so they're like active they are actively getting an easement they're actively controlling people manipulating people self-protective on the other hand is basically they see you know the world view in the self sense is the same and they're it's still a first person perspective it's just that they're on the losing side of the the win lose you know dichotomy so they're losing maybe they don't have the power they need maybe they don't have alliances with our people maybe they are simply overpowered most of the time so they still see everything you

45:00will centrically it's just that they cannot get their needs met themselves so they become self-protective and they become weak and passive which is quite fascinating because when I think of this level I think of it as being active and being you know angry and it's self-expressive and it's like dominating but that simply isn't always the case like the self-protective person tends to hide in their shell because they realize they can't they're not actually powerful enough one's identity is simply composed of their will their ideas and their wishes and it's is essentially for that reason it's essentially a fragile identity because think about it if your will is forted and your entire sense of self is built around your will and your desires well yourself is deeply threatened isn't it so it's very fragile like you'll see an opportunistic people I just said opportunistic I mean two slash three but suppose this may be applies more to

46:03the optimistic version opportunistic version with two slash three what you'll realize is like they're very dominating they are angry they're kind of like in your face they don't give a fuck pardon my French but they're also very fragile like if you show them to a chink in their armor if they do something that's embarrassing or that shows weakness if they are overcome in some way if they show that they aren't like if you win over them in some way if you show yourself to be stronger in a certain area than them they're they're gonna get angry and they're they're really not gonna like it and it's very fragile it can be something stupid and they get all angry and they get all aggressive and they get all self-righteous and they get all you know they can even get like

47:06downright aggressive and violent with you okay so it's this is simply because the person's identity is built on their needs getting met and it's like a self-imaging thing and if that if they can if they show themselves unable to get their needs met or their desires another people are seen to be stronger than them there it's a deep threat to them it's not just like it's not just like a funny thing it's like a threat it's like an actual threat to their identity they have a social front and it's the social front is basically that they manipulate they control they lie and they deflect and they blame other people and they also spend a lot of time gathering info on other people to outfite them okay so it's like their social personality is is quite obvious and it's quite predictable however on the inside you know when they're at home or when they're on their own they might actually feel the

48:10opposite of these things they might feel weak they might doubt their strength they might doubt um their power they might um realize that other people are stronger than them and so on and so forth so it's sort of split personality self-respect is based on the level of control they have over others um which is ties in with what I said there there's a preoccupation with concrete possessions and obvious symbols of power um like it can sort of look a bit cartoony you know things like having a big monster chalk for example this is a very kind of opportunistic desire take a stage two three desire because it's like here's my strength here's my power it's also kind of like you know when young boys are into like superheroes in action men for example and it's you know it's kind of a similar thing it's kind of like their their

49:15it's the poster boy they put the poster boys of the the stage two slash three rules are acknowledged and they're followed if it brings immediate advantage or gain but otherwise the rules do not matter to them and they actually get kind of a kick out of not falling the rules because there it's like they're you know they're setting their will over the will of other people they look for danger and they try to avoid it so again the world is like a jungle so they're always sort of on the lookout for danger and they're preoccupied with preventing it their stock response when threatened is anger so if you hit me I will hit you back I'll sway at you I'll kill you um like they they they even if you don't hit them like if you hurt them in some way or if you just demonstrate yourself to be superior in some way that is actually not very

50:17threatening in order like for or for most people for them it's really threatening and they get angry it's almost like you can sense a a fight with stage two three people you can sense like an underlying rage that is going on all the time it's like it's not always um fully express via behavior it's something you can sort of sense it's like it's like a very dense um very kind of anti social energy they project their anger onto other people so this is fascinating like although there is sort of more awareness of their needs their wants of desires and that their stock response to life is to get angry essentially um this anger is still projected on other people which is a fact I mean listen I've talked about projection before it's a fascinating mechanism basically what we do is when things are too painful like aspects of ourselves are too painful to admit we project them

51:22on other people so we see them in everyone else but ourselves and of course we are the ones that have it right so what's happening with stage two and three is it the anger is literally like their coping mechanism and it's almost as though to become fairly aware of their anger and the consequences of their anger and how it drives them would be far too painful because it would underwire their entire mind so this anger is projected like all um unacknowledged psychological material is and therefore it's not owned it's not the person doesn't realize they're actually angry it's like they see everyone else is being angry and being against them when they might actually not be um but they don't see themselves as being angry which is kind of like a vicious cycle because if you're raging and you don't even realize it well there's maybe there's you can even you can double the rage and you still don't realize it right there's like an endless amount of rage it's

52:26possible because there is no self-reflection upon it and along these lines the person shows little remorse doesn't feel responsible for their actions they blame others and they tend to cause a lot of damage and hurt to other people without realizing it so to sum up folks that is the three those are the three pre-conventional levels of ego development symbiotic, impulsive and opportunistic slash self-protective um I think the one that is most relevant for adults is and for you and for all the reasons I spoke about at the beginning of the episode it's really stage two slash three the um the opportunistic self-protective stage because you know this is really when like at this stage so when we you know we really have a fairly strong sense of self you know we can remember this phase

53:27in our life where we were like you know fighting against the world and we didn't care about the rules and it was all about anger and it was all about violence and aggression or maybe we were self-protective but in any case we were wrapped up in the first person perspective but still sort of conscious enough to you know to have some measure of like decision-making and of um what's the word you know having a self-narrative I suppose you could say so these are the two slash three is really when we could say like the beginning of your personality okay and again two slash three is is something we actually revert to quite easily like look at look when you're in an argument or look when someone drives out in front of you in traffic or look at when you know you're you and your boss are in an argument or look at when you get sacked or look at when

54:29someone you don't like is on TV you actually be very surprised at how like you your attention narrows and you go way back down to like the opportunistic level and it's all just about you and your needs and you don't really care about other people very much and I don't say that as like a judgmental thing it's just the structure of this level and it's just we regress under stress what we do I just think that this stage two slash three is that it's not very easy to relate to stages one and two it's quite easy to relate to stage two and two slash three because we regress to it's like one of the early stages early stages we regress to regularly and also I'm sure you know people who are at stage two slash three these people are they have a sort of dangerous aura around them that you you don't never really know where you stand because you feel you're

55:30walking on eggshells and you feel like they could strike you at any time like literally you probably will have examples of them in your life I have examples in my life and there's a pattern like that is quite an identifiable you know type of person okay so folks that is pre-conventional ego development I will encourage you to go and listen to the playlist which I'll link to that includes the last week's episode the intro episode and it will include the episodes three four and five in this series once I've published them this series is every Wednesday in September 2026 so so do come back for the next long four ribeshods every Wednesday you also have snippets of each of these episodes on Thursday Sunday and Tuesday this is all released always a 9 p.m. central European time APM UK time 3 p.m. Eastern time make sure to

56:30subscribe on Apple podcasts or Spotify if you want to go deeper with this work you can join my fortnightly newsletter pre-order my latest book the Boundless Body or try a free coaching session with me the links are in the description for those I'm Ross Edwards four time author humanistic existential coach I'm host of the Deep Psychology podcast and I will see you next Wednesday for the next installment in this series on ego development theory take care