ABSTRACT
Despite various pronouncements upon ego development in his own work, Lawrence Kohlberg is not, nor has he claimed to be, an ego psychologist. Weighing his contribution to a subject not his own is thus properly more an inferential matter than an assessment of those productions he himself deems as contributions. Many psychologists, for example, now consider that Piaget's work makes an important contribution to the understanding of emotion (Cicchetti and Hesse, 1982; Chandler et al., 1978; Harter, 1979; Cowan, 1978; Elkind, 1967; Tharinger, 1981; Kegan, Noam and Rogers, 1982; Greenspan, 1979; DeCarie, 1978) despite the fact that (1) Piaget himself did not take on the subject, limiting himself mostly to sidereferences and speculations, much as Kohlberg has done with the ego; and (2) most of what Piaget actually did say about emotion (e.g., emotion as energetics) is not what theorists such as those cited above take to be the source of his contribution to the topic; they are impressed rather by the usefulness of those ideas he did concentrate upon to the topic they are interested in. In other words, Piaget is taken as an important contributor to the understanding of emotion primarily because he exceeded himself in the study of cognition. In this essay, I take a somewhat similar view of the importance of Kohlberg's work on moral development for the study of ego development. Although Kohlberg has certainly been more interested in ego development than was Piaget in emotion, they share the attributes of (1) having opened a bigger door than they knew, and (2) being more impressive on a subject not of their own choosing at the implicit rather than at the explicit level. In fact, my own view is that while (1) Kohlberg's explicit conception of the relationship between moral and ego development is problematic, at best, and inconsistent with his basic premises, at worst; (2) Kohlberg's general body of work is so filled with promising implications for reconstructions and new connections in the field of ego psychology as to make it the single most original and potentiating contribution to the understanding of the ego since Sigmund Freud's.
