Spiral Dynamics in Action

2The Architect of the Existential Staircase – Clare Graves

Clare Graves and the Existential Staircase

“Damn it all, a person has the right to be who he is.”

Graves, in Beck and Cowan (1996, p. 28)

Clare W. Graves worked as professor of psychology at the Union College in the upper Hudson Valley in Connecticut, America. The aftermath of the Second World War stimulated him to search for a fresh reason for the shifting views of human nature. As a developmental theorist, Graves was interested in the ways in which different people conceptualized maturity differently, and why some, but not others, navigated through emerging and often chaotic phases of human existence. In the book Spiral Dynamics, Beck and Cowan explained that the Gravesian orientation was to integrate bio-, psycho- and socio-dynamics; and to “mesh human knowledge and breaching the walls of academia that separated disciplines and fields” (1996, p. 29). In Figure 2.1, Clare Graves in his prime can be seen.

Figure 2.1 Clare W Graves at the height of his academic career.

Graves was a professor of psychology and originator of a theory of adult human development. He was born in New Richmond, Indiana. He was deeply rooted in the work of Freud, Watson and Skinner, Rogers and the Maslow conceptual system. He even studied the latest cognitive psychological theories of the time. Students would ask him which theory was right. ...