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Preconventional ego development takes us from being newborns with zero identity and zero meaning-making capacity to being functional members of the society. This is a huge transformation, and constitutes the first 10-15 years of our life.
This is a snippet from my episode Pre-Conventional Stages of Ego Development (#161)
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Deep Psychology — What Really is Preconventional Ego Development?. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
Hi there, just to say this is a short snippet from this week's main episode which was published on Wednesday as always. If you want the full episode you can find it just below this one. So what actually is pre-conventional eagle development from like a bigger point of view before 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 any self referencing which in other words we don't we don't refer anything back to ourselves at all. Like you know you look at your mum and you don't refer your mum back to yourself. You just see your mum. You don't have any interpretations. You're not interpreting the world on 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 we recognize our body and our mind are our own in the rest of the world around us is not us. The world that 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. 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 a convention. You know it's sort of acceptable to the majority.
So you can think that is pre-conventional is going from zero to zero to having all of that. So this is like pre-convent going through pre-conventional successfully actually gets you to being a functional civilized adult. So this is no big deal out of what to say. This is a big deal. This is for most people this is all the development they go through in life. Most of the development they go through is just this. So that's kind of the big picture of it. We go from zero ego to conventional ego. Pre-conventional ego development describes the normal stages of child development up until children become socialized. They learn the rules. They have impulse control. They can cooperate. They can fulfill responsibilities 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 they can live an ordinary life without having to be fully dependent on adults. So again that's a big deal. If we're looking at from the children the point of view of child development is a huge deal for children to go through pre-conventional. The first 10 to 15 years of a child's life. However there is no guarantee that a child will complete post-conventional development. And in fact there's a significant chunk of adults that do not complete pre-conventional development at all. And these people often require care and guardianship or they are
they're not very well like socialized. They find it hard to function properly. And a pre-conventional we are yet like this is true of all the pre-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 life, their own needs, their own life story, their own life, their own challenges, their own desires and so forth. We cannot see another person with any great complexity or detail. So that is 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.
Hi there just to say this is a short snippet from this week's main episode which was published on Wednesday as always. If you want to fill episode you can find it just below this one.
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