ABSTRACT
When asked to complete the sentence, “Sometimes she wished that…,” one person writes, “she were dead,” another writes, “she could go on a trip,” and a third writes, “she had six other lives to lead, concurrently, and could skip among them at will.” What kinds of people might generate these rather different responses? Jane Loevinger would say these three individuals differ in their ego development, with the first at the Self-Protective stage, the second at the Self-Aware stage, and the third at the Individualistic stage. Alternatively, York and John’s (1992) personality typology would suggest that the three individuals differ in their basic modes of adaptation, with each of them exemplifying a different personality prototype: the first appears Conflicted; the second, Traditional; and the third, Individuated. How are these two accounts related? More generally, how is ego development related to personality in adulthood? This is the topic of the present chapter.
