Back in the 1950's and 1960's, Clare W Graves was a psychology professor at Union College in NY State. He found himself at that time baffled by the valid questions of his students asking who or which leading thinker was "right" or "correct" in their research and theories about psychology. Things were often more complex than "who is right" and at the time, there was no widely established model that dealt with complexity (however, I do understand that people were working on these ideas to some degree at this time). Graves set out to create a theory that could explain human psychology better than the disjointed discourse of the era. He needed data to test his theories, and so in 7 years from 1952 to 1959 he used his own psychology students (who were a diverse group of people from all over the world). He used this data and his ideas as the basis for a theory that he called "The Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory" (hereafter referred to as "ECLET").

In brief, Graves theorized that in response to external conditions, humans develop new bio-psycho-social coping systems to solve problems. He theorized "man's nature is not a set thing, that it is ever emergent, that it is an open system, not a closed system." His work observes that the emergence within humans of new bio-psycho-social coping systems in response to external conditions follows a hierarchy, and that each level in the hierarchy is respectively either the human trying to make the existential adapt to it, or the human adapting to the existential. He also saw this process as infinite, or "never ending".