Ellis/A Systemic History, 2.Stages of Psychological Development

My second, psychological, section follows the continuing impact of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops in the development of each individual human being in response to their culture and environment. The history in this section is thus once more a cyclic history, replayed as each of us grows. The reinforcing feedback process tends to make our development reach a series of plateaus as we reach a mode of thinking and behaving that works sufficiently well, given our bodily development and situation, for the moment. However, these temporary points of stability are disrupted by new conditions that begin to make our old mode frustrating, and trigger adaptive balancing loops. After a period of transition, these balancing loops then settle back into a new phase of relative stability. This punctuated equilibrium in human psychological development was first tracked by Piaget, and has more recently been pursued into adult development by Robert Kegan.