Loevinger's Stages of Ego Development - Criticism

Criticism

Some have maintained that 'in general, Loevinger's model suffers from a lack of clinical grounding', and that arguably 'like Kohlberg's theory...it confuses content and structure'. Based as her research was on the assessment of verbalised material, because 'the measure focuses so heavily on conscious verbal responses, it does not discriminate intelligent, liberal people with severe ego defects from those who actually are quite integrated'.

Nevertheless the wide extent of her research must give a certain weight to her findings. 'Loevinger's (1976) model of development is derived entirely from empirical research using her sentence completion test...The manuals contain hundreds of actual completions, organized by exemplary categories'.

Read more about this topic:  Loevinger's Stages Of Ego Development

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)