Last time I said
I think it makes a lot more sense to think of the levels as levels that the problems are at. Trying to get down a bowl of spicy chili because that's the only food available? That's stage 2. Stage 1 will fail because you can't be not-hungry and not-burny at the same time. Stage 3 is irrelevant, because there ain't no one else in the problem description.
When talking to a friend about this stuff, I used a different example of being stuck on a desert island without anyone else in the problem description. She pointed out that a Kegan stage 4 is still likely to relate to the problem differently and do stuff like systematically map out the island... which rings true.
And the frustrations I had with engineers not seeming to understand the math they're using and instead just "throwing equations at the problem" sure looks like a developmental stage issue. The blank faces when you try to explain the difference between "knowing how to solve a problem" and "knowing how to figure out how to solve a problem". The ability to plug and chug enough to keep their job, but not able to see at a glance what the math is actually doing for them. They're subject to the math, and cannot take the math as object and look at what it implies.
Or sometimes even the technical stuff is done through social cognition. The sense where it's all "A good engineer would do this. I'm a good engineer, so I will do this", rather than noticing when the context leads to the math pointing in a new direction. They're subject to their model of an engineer. And their model of an engineer is subject to a certain set of equations and design principles. And relationships between mathematical symbols.
Maybe rather than dyadic relationships between humans, it's better understood as relationships between... "ontologically basic things"? Some sort of category that can include mathematical symbols?
The plug and chug engineer that is doing what prof told him because prof told him is doing stage 2. They can take symbols as object and perform relationships on them. They can't hold these relationships as objects in any meaningful ways, they just perform them.
The "I'm a good engineer, so I do what good engineer does" engineer is stage 3, since it can hold the relationships between symbols as object and do with them what a "good engineer" does, but they are subject to their model of "good engineer", which is a relationship between equations that they throw at things. So it's social cognition, but on a technical level, the "engineer" that they're socially modeling is just a set of relationships between relationships of symbols.
So let's try this again. I think I'm getting more comfortable with this Kegan shit.
Stage 0 is where you can't detach from objects at all. You can't take rocks as object, subject to rockness, because you are rock. You struggle when rocks need to be stacked.
Stage 1 is where you can hold objects like rocks as things you can represent, and act on them to organize them into relationships like stacking them on top of each other, or acting on impulses to shove things into your mouth hole or your wiener thing into other holes. You struggle when you have an impulse to shove food into your mouth and also to "not be fat".
Stage 2 is where you can hold these first order relationships as objects which you can organize into second order relationships (of first order relationships). You can not shove the donut into your mouth hole, so that you don't get fat, so that Cindy will be attracted to you and let you shove your wiener thing into her hole or whatever. You can hold mathematical symbols as object and plug and chug relationships on them like addition and multiplication as taught in school. You struggle when you have to figure out which equation to plug and chug into, or when your understanding of how to manipulate Cindy into bed fails because she feels manipulated and objectified faster than you can manipulate around it.
Stage 3 can hold second order relationships as objects and organize them into third order relationships ("relationships" in the Kegan sense). You can see Cindy as more than a sex object, and have a real relationship with her. She might be attracted to you because you pursue Health for its own sake, leading you to not be a fatass anyway. You can pick which equations to use because you have a model of what Engineering is, and you do what a good engineer does. But if Cindy doesn't like your friends, or Engineering doesn't know how to solve this problem, or if your wife Cindy expects you to be her shoulder to cry on while you're at work doing Engineering, you're SOL.
Stage 4 can hold third order relationships ("relationships") as object and organize them into fourth order relationships ("systems"). You can explain to Cindy that the way you keep a roof over her head is by doing Engineering from 9 to 5, and while you love her and all that, Husband stuff comes outside these hours unless it's emergency. You can design a legal system that allows you to manage large networks of third order relationships, and you can recognize when "Engineering" fails and not be blind to that. But when your legal system clashes with another similar system, or when the system of thinking from which you derive Engineering fails, you're SOL.
Stage 5 can hold fourth order relationships ("systems") as object and organize them into fifth order relationships, and so you can actually engage with systems of morality disagreeing with legal systems without crashing or refusing to consider one of them. You can talk to people in woo speak without abandoning scientific thinking, with an actual understanding of why one applies over the other in context and seek to resolve discrepancies between Science and Theology and the like.
So yeah, stage 3 doesn't require "other people" to have "relationships" with, and the word "relationship" is already misleading because it's a third order relationship between individual humans assumed to represent second order relationships.
And the "marrying the egregore" thing generalizes. For example, a stage 5 person can do true multiculturalism without being thrown off by conflicts, where stage 4 would have a system of how to handle inter-system conflicts so that the uncertainty doesn't have to be entertained, stage 3 would follow this system because their egregoric husband told them to, and stage 2 would espouse and follow this rule because they can use it to manipulate others/not get in trouble.