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| Volume 27, Number 4 |
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Genetic Epistemologist Homepage
Bonnie E. Litowitz, Ph.D. A version of this paper, translated by Professor Remi Clignet, appeared in
Bulletin de psychologie 51(5) 437, 1998. Much has been written about Piaget's exposure to psychoanalysis
and about his subsequent repudiation of certain aspects of Freudian
theory. At the same time, many writers have taken a integrative
approach, searching for rapprochements between Freudian and Piagetian
theories or focusing on ways in which Piaget's conception of how
intelligence develops during the childhood years might contribute to
psychoanalytic theory.
In what follows I will not attempt an exhaustive review of this
well traveled ground but will instead focus on convergences in the
theories of these two pioneers in twentieth century psychology. I will argue
that these similarities could be attributed to Piaget's
well-documented personal history, but they could also be viewed as representative of
a shifting Zeitgeist as the nineteenth century gave way to the
twentieth. As the twentieth century progressed, however, the
Zeitgeist shifted once again, yielding new theoretical conceptions: post-freudian
psychoanalytic theories and post-piagetian views on child development.
These new views share more in common with each other than with
their predecessors (Litowitz, 1989). Finally, I will suggest that as this
century draws to a close with 'the decade of the brain' we are witnessing
a return to a biological view of mind and development once again
more compatible with Freud and Piaget than with the theories that
had supplanted them.
Freudian developmental theory
Every psychoanalytic theory from Freud's earliest
models to the latest post-freudian versions is imbued with
notions of development and depends on an explicit or
implicit view of how the child changes during the course of
his/her growth. With the possible exception of Studies
on Hysteria (1893-1895) which he co-authored with
Breuer, Freud laid out his subsequent models the
topographic and the structural along a developmental sequence.
In the topographic model the mind is divided into
two systems: the unconscious and the preconscious.
Knowledge in the unconscious system is repressed and
unavailable to consciousness without overcoming
resistances (e.g., censorship, the defenses). Unconscious
knowledge is never completely knowable but only
interpretable through its derivatives dreams, parapraxes,
actes manquéswhich overcome resistance by means
of disguise and compromise. The contents of the
preconscious system are potentially accessible to
conscious awareness, although only a small portion is
illuminated by the searchlight or eye of consciousness at any
given moment. The eye of consciousness is described as
looking inward, much as the perceptual eye looks
outward. Unconscious thought is characterized by primary
process thinking which lacks negation or logical connections
and favors the over-inclusions and 'just-as'
relationships evident in condensed dream images and
displacements. Freud claimed that primary process thinking was
phylogenetically, and continues to be ontogenetically, prior
to secondary process or logical thought, acquired later
in childhood and familiar to us in our waking life
(1900, 1915a).
Freud replaced the systems of the topographic model
with the tripartite agencies of the structural model when
it became clear that some mental structures, such as
the defenses, are unconscious but were never
repressed (Arlow & Brenner, 1964). In the structural model
the agency of the id is comparable to the earlier
unconscious system, while the agency of the ego takes on the
cognitive functions of consciousness as well as mechanisms
of defense without their having to be conscious.
Developmentally, the ego is described as emerging out of
the undifferentiated matrices of id-ego and ego-other,
with the agency of the superego developing as a
consequence of relations with others during the oedipus complex
later in childhood (at around 3-5 years) (1923).
Freud never treated any children directly; his one
case history of a child, Little Hans, was an 'analysis'
conducted by the boy's father, who was an acolyte of Freud's
and husband of Freud's former patient, the boy's
mother (1909). Freud based his theory of development
on changes that occur (he hypothesized) in the sexual
instinct or libido over the course of early childhood. This theory
is best laid out in his Three essays on the theory of
sexuality, (1905) but is recapitulated throughout his writing
(1905, p.244-5). The hypothesized changes were twofold: (1)
as development progressed the libido dominates
different zones in a specific sequence of oral, anal,
phallic, genital; and (2) the libido seeks satisfaction first in
oneself (narcissism) and then from another (object love).
Freud sought and found evidence for this theory in his
clinical work with adult patients whose neuroses were
described by him as fixations in or regressions to earlier points
on these lines of development (Gedo & Goldberg, 1973).
Freud's structural theory reached its apotheosis in
ego psychology which dominated psychoanalytic
theorizing for decades, especially in America, under the guidance
of Freud's daughter Anna. Anna Freud came to
psychoanalysis through the avenue of the education of
young children, whom she viewed as having an innate urge
to complete development. In contrast to her father,
Anna Freud worked with many children. Her father had
articulated the foundation of his theory of neuroses as
universal developmental stages, and Anna Freud sought to
legitimize those stages through observation of
normally functioning children, as well as through treatment
of disturbed children (1965).
In her research Anna Freud described specific lines
of developmental; and she viewed the goal of both
education and treatment as strengthening the child's
initially fragile ego and fostering autonomy. The ego is
described as an organ of adaptation, both modulating the
pressures from the other agencies within and dealing with
external reality. A strong ego with mature defenses (e.g.,
sublimation) in place can navigate safely through life's
stressors (e.g., separations, illnesses), while a weak ego
with immature defenses (e.g., projection, introjection,
isolation) will succumb to psychological illness (e.g.,
neuroses, depressions) (1946).
In England Melanie Klein was taking a different
approach to development, although also based solidly in
Freudian theory. Klein's theory was concerned with the
vicissitudes of aggression, the other instinct that appeared later
in Freud's theory as the death instinct. While Freud
had delineated the course of the libido in normal
development and in pathologies, Klein asked: How does the child
learn to manage its aggressive impulses and their
resultant states of anxiety? Her answer was, by projecting hate
out onto the object and introjecting it into oneself in
repeated cycles; but the child's problem is that the hated object
is also the loved object (satisfier of libido). This
dilemma necessitates two developmentally sequential
"positions" as solutions to the problematic relationship between
child and object: the paranoid-schizoid and the
depressive. The first position solves the problem by splitting the
object into two partsa good object and a bad
objectthereby protecting and preserving the good from the bad. Such
a solution, however, is ultimately unsuccessful since the
child must learn to relate to a whole (unified) object that is
both good and bad. The second position describes ways
that the child seeks to heal the earlier split or part
objects (Segal, 1964). Klein's emphasis was not on
repression and sublimation as efforts to adapt to external reality
but on the internal world of the child's unconscious
phantasies, which are portrayed as filled with oral and
anal destructiveness and primitive defensive mechanisms
such as splitting and projection. Klein's evidence came
from her treatment of children and adults, and the goal of
her 'depth' analyses was to confront and articulate
these archaic (both unconscious and early) phantasies.
These two views of developmentthe lighter one
focused on progressive adaptation, the darker focused
on regressive statesclashed when the Freuds, escaping
the Nazi Anschluss, took up refuge and residency in
England. These confrontations, well documented
elsewhere, formed the historical matrix out of which later
theories emerged in varied forms: ego-psychologies;
object-relations theories; self-psychologies; relational
theories; intersubjective theories (Greenberg & Mitchell,
1983). Ego psychology remained loyal to the
Freud-A.Freud tradition: focusing on interagency conflict, and
interpreting resistance and defense with the goal of
increasing adaptation to reality. Object-relations theories,
following M. Klein, focus on how psychic structures are built out
of partial and conflictual internalizations of
representations of early parental figures. Heinz Kohut (1977a)
gradually broke away from the traditional Freudian position
to articulate a psychology of the self, which
develops capacities for self-regulation out of internalized
functions of others. Relational theory, evolving out of a
Sullivanian perspective, further turned away from instinctual
drives towards explorations of dyadic, interactive relations
with others (Mitchell, 1988). Intersubjective theory builds
on Kohut's concept of empathy by focusing on the
mutual influences of the separate, inner realities of self and
other (Stolorow, Brandchaft & Atwood, 1987). In spite of
these differences, however, all later theories share a
joint A.Freud-M.Klein legacy: the need to address
development more directly and more globally. That is, all
later theories have had to situate a psychoanalytic theory
of pathology squarely in terms of deviance from or delays
in a normal developmental sequence.
As a consequence, increasingly psychoanalytic
writers have felt the need to pay attention to what is
already known about normal development, trying to
incorporate those observational and experimental 'facts' into
their theories of development, or minimally constraining
their theories according to those 'facts'. The
distinction between the 'clinical child', reconstructed from child
or adult treatment data, and the 'observed child',
constructed out of experimental psychological data,
has become well established (Stern, 1985). Only
very recently has this looking outside of
psychoanalysis proper, for constraints or foundations, been
questioned (Goldberg, 1990; Wolff, 1996).
In their search for other developmental models
many psychoanalysts have turned to Piaget and found
much that is familiar and compatible. The considerable
overlap in conceptual base between Freudian and
Piagetian theories is the focus of the remainder of this paper.
I suggest that this theoretical convergence may arise
from Piaget's personal history, as others have noted, and I
will discuss this interpretation first. Then I will identify
and briefly discuss aspects of Piagetian theory that
especially converge with Freudian psychoanalytic theory,
suggesting an alternate interpretation: both theorists were
influenced by Darwin's evolutionary biological perspective
that dominated late nineteenth and early twentieth
century theorizing. In the last section I will describe the
shared approach of post-freudian and post-piagetian
theories, and the recent return to a biological view of development.
Piaget's psychoanalytic development
Piaget was born in 1896 when Freud and Breuer
were publishing the first psychoanalytic writing,
Studies on Hysteria. When Freud died in England in 1939,
Piaget was in his early forties. Piaget lived 40 more years,
dying in 1979 at the age of 83. In his writing he
acknowledges an interest in, if not an early fascination for, the
new discoveries that were emerging from Freud and his circle.
In an autobiographical account of his life, Piaget
credits his mother's "neurotic temperament [that] made
our family life somewhat troublesome" with both his
interest in and his turning away from psychoanalysis:
...my mother's poor mental health. . .which at
the beginning of my studies in psychology made me intensely interested in questions of
psychoanalysis and pathological psychology. Though
this interest helped me to achieve independence
and to widen my cultural background, I have never since felt any desire to involve myself deeper
in that particular direction, always much
preferring the study of normality and of the workings of
the intellect to that of the tricks of the
unconscious (Evans, 1973, p.106).
Intimating a premature overexposure to his
mother's unconscious, he noted a resulting aversion to
anything that departed from reality and consequently an
attraction early in his life to serious work. That serious work led
him into natural science and particularly biology,
interests shared by Freud (Kohut, 1977b).
After finishing his graduate studies in science,
Piaget spent time in Zurich, Geneva and Paris. In Zurich he
was exposed to Bleuler's work in his psychiatric clinic and
to Freud's writings and the new psychoanalytic
journal, Imago; and he attended lectures by Jung and
Pfister (Evans, 1973). In Geneva Piaget undertook an
eight month analysis with Sabina Spielrein, which he
referred to as a 'didactic' or 'training' analysis; he briefly
analyzed some patients, presumably as part of his
training; and he joined the Swiss Psychoanalytic
Society (Schepeler, 1993). Piaget has never given a uniform
or complete account of these experiences in his
various autobiographical accounts, but Schepeler (1993)
reviews what scholars have garnered from written work
and interviews (see also Vidal). Also at that time
Piaget published a paper on "Psychoanalysis in its relations
with child psychology" (1920, presented to the Alfred
Binet Society), and he spoke on 'symbolic thought and
the thought of the child' at the 1922 Congress of
Psychoanalysis in Berlin (where Freud who was present
completely captured, according to Piaget's remembrance,
his audience's attention [Evans, 1973]). Whatever
his motivations and feelings were at the time, Piaget
later always portrayed his interests in psychoanalysis
as academic, a phase of his continuing
postgraduate education from which he moved on to his life's work
on the growth of intelligence in children.
During this postgraduate period Piaget also spent
two years in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and working
in Binet's laboratory for Dr. Simon where he began to
work with children. Although Piaget ultimately would
turn away from clinical studies in psychiatry and
psychoanalysis, he nevertheless imported into his work
with children during this period aspects of what he
had observed in Zurich and Geneva: the unstructured
questioning of psychiatric interviewing (la méthode
clinique); and a sense that error reveals underlying structure
(cf, parapraxes). These conversations in Binet's Paris
laboratory formed the basis for Piaget's earliest books on
the construction of intelligence in children (Le langage et
la pensée chez l'enfant [ 1923]; Le jugement et
le raisonnement chez l'enfant [ 1924]). Ultimately,
however, he turned away from this method as well, in favor
of more experimentally based investigations, and
recommended that psychoanalysis do likewise; that is,
psychoanalysis, like himself, had benefited early on from
the clinical method but further advancement would need
to be more solidly based in scientific methodology
(Evans, 1973).
Respectful criticisms and critical respect
Although he maintained a respectful attitude towards psychoanalysis in general, Piaget was
nevertheless critical of specific concepts and ideas in both
theory and method; and he lamented the separateness
of psychoanalytic societies that isolated them from
the discourses of other researchers (1962a, p. 184).
As mentioned, he felt that psychoanalysis would
never advance as a science without a change in
methodology, and he applauded those (Rapaport, Wolfe [sic]) whom
he saw as moving in that direction (Evans, 1973).
Theoretically, he was most outspoken early on against what
he termed Freud's "pansexualism"; that is, Freud's view
that sexuality qua libido is the driving force in the
development of psychic structure. For Freud, the sexual
and aggressive instincts represent the biological bedrock
on which his theory is erected. For Piaget, the
biological foundations of his theory are both more pervasive
and more abstract, with logical structures (resulting from
the child's actions on the environment) developing
according to biological principles. Thus, as will be discussed
below, Freud and Piaget found different uses for biology in
their theories.
In the third of a second series of books on children
(La naissance de l'inte!ligence chez l'enfant
[1936]; La construction du réel chez l'enfant
[1937]; La formation du symbole [1945]) Piaget attempted to reconcile
his emerging general theory of the growth of structures
of intelligence in children with what he had learned from
his postgraduate psychoanalytic experiences. From
that experience he took the label of 'autism' for the
earliest, prelogical period. Bleuler had used the term in his
work with schizophrenics and Freud had 'normalized' this
form of thought in his descriptions of primary process
mentation, characteristic not only of pathology but also
of everyday life (e.g., dreams and parapraxes). For
Piaget, all thinking of the earliest period of life is autistic,
assimilating reality to the child's own affective schemas.
During the course of development cognitive structures change
to accommodate reality, and thought becomes
egocentric and then social. Yet, "autistic thought, creator of
personal symbols, remains essential in each of us throughout
his life. Later, reason develops at its expense, butand
this is the real problemdoes it ever extricate itself
entirely? Apparently not "(Gruber & Vonèche, 1977,
p.59 [1920]). And this is where, Piaget allowed,
psychoanalysis can make its contribution:
Now Freud and his disciples have shown that by the mere fact of its 'autism', this second way
of thinking [vs. 'logical thought'] was bound to
be confused, undirected, indifferent to truth, rich
in visual and symbolic schemas, and above all, unconscious of itself and of the affecfive
factors by which it was guided (Gruber &
Vonèche, 1977, p.92).
Even so, Piaget had reservations about
psychoanalysis' interpretation of affective life and its personal symbols
as fundamental to thought (1962b). Piaget found
Freud's notion of symbols, whether as compromise
formations (i.e., substitutions due to censorship) or primitive
language (i.e., an inherited archaic language),
untenable (1962a, chapter vii). Piaget argued that early
symbols that appear in play and dreams are characteristic
of infant thinking in general. Such symbols are
unconscious because all thought of this period is unconscious. There
is no need for psychoanalysis to appropriate the
unconscious "as a region" (1962a, p. 172) or symbol
formation to itself, as these are simply aspects of a
more general psychology, the structures of which Piaget
was delineating through his research:
the difficulty of the Freudian doctrine does not
lie in the facts of affectivity as such, but in
the general framework which the theory claims in the field of general psychology: the nature
of memory, the role of association, the conception of a lighting-consciousness of which
intelligence is not the active nucleus, the relationship
between the conscious and the unconscious... (1962a, p. 185)
For Piaget, "the emotional unconscious is. . .a
special case of the unconscious in general" (Evans, 1973,
p.4) and "unconscious symbolism, i.e., symbolism
whose significance is not immediately recognized by the
subject himself, is a particular case of symbolism in general
and must be considered as such" (Piaget, 1962a, p.
198); "unconscious symbolic thought follows the same laws
as thought in general" (1962a, p.212). Nor are the
special psychoanalytic concepts of censorship or
repression needed: the child does not have memories of this
period because the type of memory necessary to evoke
images has not sufficiently developed (1962a, chapter vii).
Thus, while appreciating psychoanalysis'
interesting clinical methods (lying on the couch, free-floating
associative imagery, open-ended inquiry), Piaget
nevertheless questioned its claims as a general psychology of
mind, insisting that most aspects could be subsumed under
the overall theoretical edifice he was establishing
through empirical research (1962a). In addition, he felt that
his general theory of cognitive development could rein
in over-zealous psychoanalytic theorizing. For
example, Piaget pointed out that a universal phantasy such as
the infant's hallucinating the breast, proposed by Freud
as fundamental to infant mentation, is not possible
before considerable prior cognitive development.
Psychoanalytic writers have had to accept that the capacity to
construct an image is not the origin but the culmination of a
prior sequence of masteries: first, exteriorized imitation
and then, delayed imitation; still later, interiorized
imitation, resulting in images (Sandler, 1975). In another
example, Piaget's work has raised questions about primary
narcissism postulated by Freud (1914) as a stage of
undifferentiated id-ego/self-other. On the one hand, Piaget
has demonstrated that self-object differentiation must
be present early in the infant's life as the infant begins
to construct realityan ego function. On the other hand,
he claims that the infant is egocentric, defining objects
solely by means of his/her action on them. Piaget continued
to discuss the differences in how the child relates to
objects versus object-relations in the psychoanalytic
sense (1962b), and psychoanalytic writers have been
variously influenced by his studies (Stern, 1985; Fast, 1985).
Piaget was most involved early in his career in
explicating these differences and in commenting on
psychoanalytic writers. For example, he offered an
alternate explanation for A. Freud's concept of identification
with the aggressor; and he commented on the
psychosocial sequences of E. Erikson and on the play therapies of
M. Klein and S. Isaacs. Even at the end of his long
and productive life, however, he remained willing to
engage in dialogues with psychoanalysts (1962b, 1973).
For their part, psychoanalysts were respectful and
open to Piaget in return (Wolff, 1960; Anthony, 1976;
Kohut, 1977b). Considering ego psychology's emphasis
on adaptation, many writers from that perspective looked
to Piaget for a fuller description of the ego's many
functions. As ego psychology sought to satisfy Freud's desire
that psychoanalysis become a general psychology, it
became clear that Piaget's extensive oeuvre
could provide both a more complete and also a more correct (i.e.,
confirmed by research) description of how such ego functions
as perception, memory, conceptualization, and
logical thought develop during infancya period only
available to psychoanalysts through reconstruction from
adult analyses (Wolff, 1960; Greenspan, 1979). Freud's
views on perception and memory, for example, were
both adultomorphic and outdated; and psychoanalysts
have looked to basic researchers such as Piaget (an early
critic of Freud's views in these areas) to correct and
expand their theories.
At the same time, psychoanalysts encounter in
their clinical practice many phenomena for which
Piaget's research findings could provide better explanations
than those provided by Freud (Silverman, 1971;
Sandler, 1975). For example, the imitation sequence
described above, which enables the child to evoke the image of
an absent object, makes more comprehensible the
appearance of stranger and separation anxieties in the
second half of the first year of life. Anxiety is a ubiquitous
clinical phenomenon that Freud addressed often in his
writing, finally viewing it as a signal of impending danger.
He hypothesized a developmental hierarchy of such
dangers, all of which involve separation and loss: e.g.,
separation from the mother's body in birth; separation.from
a significant other; loss of love; loss of body part
(castration). Consequently, psychoanalysts have been eager
to know how cognitive constraints might influence
these subjective experiences.
Still other theorists have found that Piaget's
theory illuminates key clinical concepts such as transference:
in what ways do the child's past experiences
generalize onto present perceptions (Wachtel, 1980;
Schlesinger-Vaccaro, 1983)? A psychoanalytic concept such as
the superego deals with moral development, and
clinicians are familiar with pathological conditions due to
excessive or insufficient guilt or shame. They have looked to
the extensive Piagetian research on moral development
to better understand how the superego functions
and develops (Nass, 1966). Lastly, there have been
some authors who have tried to merge portions of both
Freud's and Piaget's work into creative syntheses (Anthony,
1957; Dolle, 1977; Fast, 1985; Furth, 1987).
Inevitably, psychoanalytic writers who were critical of
the motivational priority Piaget granted to cognitive
structures (over the affective) were drawn to analyzing him;
but understandably they trace this defensive disavowal
back to his experiences with early parental (especially
maternal) figures (Bögels, 1986; Schepeler, 1993). It is
interesting to note that Freud has been similarly criticized for
his focus on conflicts with his father, leading him to
privilege the oedipus complex to the exclusion of earlier
dyadic struggles with his mother. These latter, then, have
become the focus of the post-freudians.
Convergent ideas
As much as Piaget must have been influenced by his
early exposure to psychoanalysis, it is equally possible
that both he and Freud were men of their times, with
their theories expressing the Zeitgeist that was dominant at
the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth centuries. That Zeitgeist was infused with Darwin's view
of the descent of man through gradual stages of
adaptation to his environment by means of the processes of
natural selectionvariation, selection, reproduction.
Ritvo (1990) has documented the profound influence
of Darwin's writing on Freud's theorizing. For his
part, Piaget has declared the influence of his own
early beginnings as a biological scientist on all his later
work, in which he sought the 'embryology of
intelligence' through: biology in the explanation of all things and of the mind itself. . .it made me decide to
consecrate my life to the biological explanation
of knowledge (Evans, 1973, p. 111).
Both men tried to create psychological theories
on biological foundations, unifying their views of the
mind with principles laid down by Darwin's theory of
evolution. For Piaget, intellectual operations proceed in terms of structures-of-the-whole. These structures
denote the kind of equilibrium toward which evolution
in its entirety is striving; at once organic,
psychological, and social, their roots reach down as
far as biological morphogenesis itself (Evans,
1973, p. 14).
Thus, a shared Darwinian legacy for both Freud
and Piaget takes the form of a belief in biological
explanation in all areas, at all levels, of human life.
Biological explanation describes an organism's
adaptation to its environment through either accommodating to
it or assimilating it to already existing schema,
thereby building up organization that strives toward
maintaining an equilibrium, as Piaget describes. Freud's two
principles of mental functioningthe pleasure and reality
principlesare obvious articulations of these modes
of adaptation (1911). 1 For Freud primary process
thinking obeys the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip)
with its ready discharge of libidinal energy, just as for Piaget
autistic thought assimilates everything to its affective
schemas. Similarly, secondary process and operational
thinking redress this imbalance by accommodating to reality.
Biological explanations address
structures-of-the-whole. For Freud these are psychic structures, as in the
agencies of the structural model, defined in relation to each
other. For Piaget these are logical structures, cognitive
structures of knowledge and intelligence. However, for
Piaget structures and their properties constituted an object
of study in their own right, and he was concerned
with structural properties from his beginnings in
biological taxonomy (Gruber & Vonèche, 1977, pp..3-22)
through his book on Structuralism (1970)
to the 'morphisms" of his last theorizing (Piaget, Henriques & Ascher,
1992). Thus, while both Freud and Piaget constructed
structural theories, only Piaget was a 'self-conscious' structuralist.
Freud and Piaget have overlapping, rather than
congruent, chronologies so that, while both were influenced
by Darwin's writing, Piaget had also the influence
of deSaussure's Course in General Linguistics
(1959 [1906-1911]). DeSaussure opened the structuralist era
by splitting off the structural (synchronic) from the
historical (diachronic), creating an additional method of
examination along with Darwin's evolutionary
perspective. DeSaussure proposed that structure could be studied
for itself, and not just as evidence of historical change.
Piaget was a major force in the structuralist movement of
the 1960s and 1970s which echoed his definition of
structure: a systemic whole, greater than the sum of its
parts, defined by the relationship of its parts, that is
closed under transformation (i.e., self-regulating) (1970).
Structures are inherently unconscious and the
question becomes how consciousness or awareness of
structure arises, either in the life of the individual or the
evolution of the species. For Freud unconscious structures
are manifest only through their derivatives, which must
be traced back inferentially through interpretation. An
early therapeutic goal, therefore, was to make the
unconscious conscious; but some structures remain forever
unconscious. This issue was one of the major forces
that impelled Freud to move from the first topographic
model to the later structural model (Arlow & Brenner, 1964).
In this later model, the therapeutic goal became, 'where
id was there ego shall be', allowing some aspects of ego
to be unconscious yet separate from the id.
Nevertheless, Freud claimed that it was his failure to be able to
explain the fact of consciousness that caused him to abandon
his earliest goal of a scientific, i.e., neurological, basis for
a psychology of mind and to focus instead on
psychical meanings (Project for a Scientific Psychology,
1950 [1895], S.E. 1, p.293).
Significantly, the question of consciousness has
reappeared as, perhaps, the major issue for recent theorists
in cognitive neuroscience and the new philosophy of
mind (e.g., Dennett, 1991; Edelman, 1992; Searle,
1992). Virtually every one of these writers feels compelled
to address the issue of consciousness as they struggle to
find an isomorphism between causality that explains
physical, material relations and inference or implication involved
in meanings. I think it is fair to say that the view of
consciousness emerging from their writings is closer to
the Piagetian than to the Freudian.
Piaget wrote often on the question of consciousness
(e.g., La Prise de Conscience [1974]); how it arises
and whether it can have a causative role in progressive
stages of cognitive development (Gruber & Vonèche,
1977, p.763-6). For Piaget, consciousness is closer to
reflective abstraction and self-awareness than to the
Freudian repressed, 'dynamic' unconscious: "the
difference between consciousness and the unconscious is only
a matter of gradation or degree of reflection" ( 1962,
p. 172; see also p. 189).
Another aspect of the Darwinian perspective shared
by Freud and Piaget is the study of universal patterns
as manifest in individual history. Just as an
evolutionary biologist or paleontologist creates theory fossil by
fossil, so Freud proposed a universal theory of mind, case
by clinical case. Nor did Piaget explore topics by means
of large statistical studies of children. Instead, like
Darwin, both theorists sought sequential patterns of
gradual change in structures as a consequence of an
individual's (organism's) interaction with its environment.
Structural change must be gradual since natura non
facit salturn (nature does not make leaps). All of
Piaget's theoretical work is a testament to that premise,
nowhere more eloquently illustrated than in the six sub stages
of the sensorimotor period. Starting with reflexes
(our inheritance) Piaget draws out the step-by-step
progression that each individual child makes to arrive at
systematic intelligence.2 At the representational level, again
the steps in the semiotic function are carefully laid out:
from signal to index to image to symbol to sign. In his
theory there may be
gapsdécalages-but there are no
leaps! Throughout Piaget's work his interest in transitional
stages and continuities is everywhere evident. All the
major accomplishments of the childe.g., seriation,
classification, conservation, moralityevolve gradually
through transitional stages.
Freud exercised equal care in setting out his
psychosexual stages, each building to the next, in an
epigenetic sequence. The twists and turns of the libido
during development are also carefully described: this
sequence leading to neurosis; that sequence to perversion or
to psychosis. Freud, like Darwin, was most interested
in transitional forms in what might at first glance appear
to be discontinuities but would turn out to be
understandable using the same principles. As noted above,
sexuality represented man's biological foundation for Freud so
it was his sexual development that he charted. He made
of the diphasic nature of sexuality a continuity: sexual
life begins in infancy, only appears to disappear in
'latency', and reappears at puberty. Piaget greatly admired
what he termed "the two fundamental facts discovered
by Freud and his schoolthat infantile affectivity
passes through well-defined stages and that there is an
underlying continuity: [these are] completely in line with those
of intellectual development" (1962, p. 185). Later,
however, Piaget contrasted his stages of "successive
integration" with Freud's psychosexual stages, each "characterized
by a dominant feature" (1962b, p. 133).
Adherence to explanation by means of transitional
forms becomes problematic for both Freud and Piaget
around the issue of autistic thought. As Piaget pondered in
1920, does autistic thinking ever completely give way to
later reason? His less than confident answer:
"apparently not"! Vidal recently commented on this dilemma:
instead of limiting himself to postulating two discontinuous types of thought, autistic
and logical, Piaget studied transitional forms, and
thus placed them on a developmental continuum.
Yet, the discovery of transitional forms between
the two forms of thought did not mitigate their opposition (1997, p. 125; see also Harris, 1997). The issue of the retention and functioning of earlier
forms along side later forms within the same individual is
a problem that continues to haunt models of the mind
in psychoanalysis (Litowitz, 1998).3
The biological perspective assumes an active
organism interacting with its environment to achieve
homeostasisa balanced, steady-state. However, both Freud
and Piaget did not require that the environment need be
very specific for the universal stages of development to
occur. Critics of both theorists attack this point directly.
Although for Piaget the environment provides general
aliments, other psychologists have demonstrated that
altered environmentswhether material or
socialradically change performance. A spate of studies during the
post-piagetian period demonstrated that a change in
material, examiner or instruction could produce effects that
challenge Piaget's interpretations of underlying structures.
In psychoanalysis the impact of a real environment
has had an interesting history. Freud turned away from
his earlier belief in actual sexual seduction as causative
of neuroses, instead privileging inner phantasy over
external reality. As with Piaget, Freud claimed that he
was describing universal developmental stages that did
not depend upon specific environmental responses,
either cultural or social. But post-freudians have argued that
the nature of one's external reality, and especially
the caretaker's actual response to the child, is a
critical ingredient in how the child constructs an inner
world. Their literature is replete with discussions of
developmental arrests or deficits due to environmental failures:
e.g., lack of 'good enough mothering', 'optimal
responsiveness', or 'empathic attunement'. Freud (1915b)
famously claimed that the object of discharge is the instinct's
most variable aspect, thereby emphasizing both
libidinal indiscriminateness and the importance of discharge
for maintaining homeostasis. In contrast, for
post-freudians the specific nature of that object tie and what is or is
not really provided become the critical factors in
determining healthy development or pathology (Greenberg &
Mitchell, 1983). A state of equilibrium does not result
from discharge alone but rather from the cooperative
interaction of a self-other system.
In this respect, Freud and Piaget are more like each
other, perhaps, than like evolutionary biologists for whom
the organism and environment form one
non-reducible whole. Those who come after Freud and Piaget ask:
if regulation is a system-property, what is the self in
'self-regulating' system? For Freud and Piaget the self
regulates itself through actions on the
environment/other, seeking a neutral regulatory stasis as a biological
given. For post-freudians and post-piagetians the self
includes the other/environment, especially initially; and
self-regulation may or may not be achieved, depending
on the nature of prior self-other interactions.
From an evolutionary point of view, the organism
is engaged in struggle vis à vis its environment, and
conflict is a major element for Freud and Piaget, but less so
(or nonexistent) in post-freudian and post-piagetian
theories. Freud was very taken by the mythos of the 'primal
horde', crediting Darwin in frequent references (Ritvo,
1990, Appendix A). In each individual life that struggle
is replayed in the triadic oedipal struggle between
child, mother and father; while within each individual
psyche another triadic struggle is being waged between
the agencies of id, ego and superego:
Peaceful relations between neighboring powers are at an end. The instinctual impulses continue
to pursue their aims with their own peculiar
tenacity and energy, and they make hostile incursions
into the ego, in the hope of overthrowing it by a surprise-attack. The ego on its side
becomes suspicious; it proceeds to counterattack and
to invade the territory of the id. Its purpose is to
put the instincts permanently out of action by
means of appropriate defensive measures, designed
to secure its own boundaries (A. Freud, 1946, p.7) Conflict and struggle, both external and internal,
permeate Freudian writing which is saturated with
warring metaphors.
Only in the 1940s and 1950s, under the hegemony
of ego-psychology, did conflict become somewhat
less ubiquitous. In its effort to become a general
psychology, accounting for normal as well as pathological
development, ego psychologists proposed conflict-free
and autonomous functions of the ego, such as
perception, memory, language, and especially a 'synthetic'
function (Hartmann, 1958 [1939]). In stressing the
integrative function of the ego these theorists hearkened back to
an instinct for self-preservation proposed but later
dropped by Freud (1914). In this way, the ego does not have
to draw on libido or aggression for its energy, but has
its own independent source. Although conflict and
defense around sex and aggression are seen as keys to
unlocking pathology, in development emphasis is displaced
onto "the organism's inherent tendency toward integration
and synthesis" (Wolff, 1960, p. 173). In treatment the
analyst seeks alliance with this part of the ego in efforts
to strengthen and expand it. Significantly, most
theorists who have tried to connect Piaget and
psychoanalysis have seen the best fit with ego-psychology, which
shares a sense of progressive adaptation (Greenspan, 1979,
p. 126).4 Even though conflict and struggle are not
as central for Piaget as for Freud, his theory does posit
roles for external challenges from an other person and
for internal struggles as the child sorts out conflicting
beliefs and explanations. Developmental movement forward
is most possible at times of decentration and
dis-equilibrium as the organism seeks to right an imbalance (i.e.,
seek equilibrium once again).
In summary, Piaget and Freud shared a joint
Darwinian legacy that includes: a belief in biological
explanations for mental phenomena; a focus on structures that
result from adaptation of organisms to their environments;
a search for transitional forms of that gradual
adaptation; the organism's goal of homeostasis; the study of
individual cases to reveal universal or species patterns;
and the impetus for change of conflict and struggle
both between and within individuals.
Later developments
Since the 1970s and 1980s there has been a
turning away from the view of development and of the
mind presented by Piaget and Freud, such that one
can legitimately refer to a post-piagetian and
post-freudian period. I will not attempt to describe in detail all
the manifestations of this newer perspective that some
might call post-structural; others, post-modern (Toulmin,
1990). Briefly stated, it is characterized by an emphasis
on interpersonal interaction, individuals working in
cooperation in contexts of specific socio-cultural activities
(Bruner, 1997). Function, not structure, is the focus; results
are interpreted locally, not as universals; and semiotic
systems mediate knowledge, not just represent it. Vygotsky is
most often viewed as the paterfamilias of the
developmentalists taking this approach, and Bowlby is most often cited
as the progenitor of psychoanalysts with this new world
view (Litowitz, 1989).
Bowlby claimed that what we seek is attachment
to another person, not instinctual discharge; and
subsequent theorists have elaborated many different versions of
our relatedness to others (e.g., object relation theories,
self-psychologies, intersubjectivism, relational
theories) (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).5
For these theorists regulation is an attribute of the child-mother
(self-other) system that becomes internalized within the child
(self); the goal of development is for the child to be able to
do for itself what he/she could originally only do with
an other person (Schore, 1994). Similarly, Vygotsky's
famous dictum is: "Every function in the child's cultural
development appears twice, on two levelsfirst between
people as an interpsychological category and then inside
the child as an intrapsychological category" (1978, p.
128). Thus, self-regulation is not an inherent property
of abstract structures but a function that constitutes a goal
of a dyadic system; that is, that the self in a self-other
system internalizes dyadic regulation to become self-regulating.
In summary, boundaries are not drawn (as
before) around the child and around the environment, but
around the child-environment as one unit; and importantly,
the environment is not things-in-the-world or people
as things, but people like oneself (Ricouer, 1992). Social
and cultural constructivism, not biological adaptation,
become the focus with emphases on narrative and
interpretation, rather than logical structures and causal
explanations (Bruner, 1986, 1997).
The last decade of this centurythe 1990sburst
into this context of post-piagetian and post-freudian
social constructivism with an explosion of post-DNA
discoveries in genetics that has revitalized the biological
perspective. Data made possible by new technologies for
brain-imaging and advances in psychopharmacology have
led the media to dub this the 'decade of the brain',
when questions of the mind will be answered by discoveries
of the brain. Both Freud and Piaget had hoped "to be
able someday to demonstrate relationships between
mental structures and stages of nervous development" (Piaget,
in Evans, 1973, p. 142), but neither man lived to see
this wish fulfilled.
Now, in recent conferences neuroscientists,
cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists are picking
up that program as their own under the banner of
neo-darwinism. In search of mind, they are extending
Darwinian principles 'downward' into the neural networks
of the brain:
The phenomena of psychology depend on the species in which they are seen, and the
properties of species depend on natural
selection...Selection not only guarantees a common pattern in
a species but also results in individual diversity
at the level of the finest neural networks
(Edelman, 1992, pp.40 & 64). In their approach the neo-darwinians are part of
a radical shift in scale taking place in many disciplines;
for example, to the subatomic in physics and to
the subsymbolic in neural network or connectionist
computer architecture (Clark, 1989). In contrast, in Freud's time
the structure of the neurone was only just being
described, confining him to gross anatomy; nor did Piaget
have access to recent developments in molecular biology
or microbiology.
Diversity, selection and reproductionthese are
the biological principles currently being taken from Darwin
to explain both the evolution and the development of
the human mind-brain. The new biologists of the
mind-brain are applying these Darwinian concepts to populations
of neurones, not populations of individuals.
Competitive struggles at the neuronal levels are resolved
through natural selection when some neural connections
are strengthened and reproduced at the sacrifice of
others. Examples of this approach include: Edelman's
Neural Darwinism and his 'theory of neuronal group
selection' (1987, 1992); Dawkin's 'selfish gene' (1976); and
the evolutionary psychology of Barkow, Costaides & Tooby
in their Adapted Mind (1992).
In his book, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), dedicated
to Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Edelman
credits Piaget with laying the "groundwork for modern studies
of cognition in development" (p.40), although Edelman
finds Piaget's "idiosyncratic and original" views expressed
in Biology and Knowledge (1971) "somewhat
metaphorical in its comparisons of embryology and
psychology" (p.260). These writers, and others taking this
current perspective, see themselves as completing what
the pioneersFreud, Piaget and Darwinbegan.
It is interesting to speculate how Piaget would
have responded, were he alive today, to these new
overtures. He criticized what he termed neo-darwinists for
their notion that change occurs by means of the process
of natural selection acting on chance or random
mutations. This, he felt, vitiated his belief in an active
organism whose actions initiate change (Gruber & Vonèche,
1977, p.786). However, Barkow, Costaides & Tooby claim
that "despite the fact that chance plays some role in
evolution, organisms are not primarily chance agglomerations
of stray properties" (1992, p.52); and Edelman stresses
that the completion of Darwin's program also requires
an understanding of the influence of behavior on
natural selection (1992, p.46).
It seems reasonable, then, to assume that Piaget would
be a welcome participant in dialogues with these
new theorists whose interests in genetics and natural
selection resonate with his own lifelong preoccupation
with variation and distribution of mollusca
populations (Schepeler, 1993). Perceptively, Piaget observed that
a central question for development is the balance
between permanence and variability; and he criticized Freud
for overemphasizing the former at the expense of the
latter: "In spite of appearance, Freud is much less of a
geneticist than he is usually considered to be" (1962a, p. 185).
Yet, one can only wonder how Piaget himself would
respond to the post-structuralism of the new theories that
stress stable states not as permanent
structures-of-the-whole (stages) but as shifting moments of interaction in an
ever-evolving, dynamic organism-environment system.
Current theorists turn to the mathematical modeling
of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamical systems to illustrate how constantly shifting phenomena will
necessarily produce emergent patterns.6
These mathematical theories are being used to model notoriously
unpredictable phenomena such as the weather and evolution,
and the hope is to use these nonlinear models to
explain development as well. However, while evolution
and development both address change over time,
development is, in a sense, predictable: Navaho babies grow
up to be Navaho adults; Bushman babies grow up to
be Bushman adults; and so forth. In human
development structural patterns do not have to emerge solely
from random phenomena. It is less clear how the new
theories will account for this fact (so much the focus of the
preceding perspective), and perhaps this is why the
new mathematical models offer thus far more promise
than final solution.
One area of development where they have shown
most promise is motor development. Esther Thelen's
studies (1995) best exemplify this new approach which seeks
to build on and extend Piaget's work:
We seek to restore the primacy of perception and
action in the evolving mental and social life of the child. .
.that repeated cycles of perception and action can give rise
to emergent new forms of behavior without
preexisting mental or genetic structures that is the link between
the simple activities of the young infant and the growing
life of the mind. What is new here is not that cognition
grows from roots in perception and action. This was the
fundamental assumption of Piaget. . .[but rather] the
acceptance of growing humans as true dynamic systems
(1995, pp. 80 & 93).
In drawing on new evolutionary biological models
and using dynamic systems theory, these new
developmental theorists are indebted to Piaget's construction of an
active child whose increasingly complex organization
emerges as a systems-property through interactions with
environmental "affordances" (Gibson, 1979).
These models begin, as did Piaget, with as little
as possible presupposed as innate or given, viewing
growth as a consequence of the child's actions on its
environment:
The assumption here is that infants are
motivated by a taska desire to get a toy into the
mouth or to cross the room to join the familyand
that the task, not prespecified genetic instructions,
is what constitute the driving force of change (1995, p.86).
This is a return to a view of the child and of mind built
on a biological perspective rather than the social constructivist basis of later theorists. The
physical/material, the social and the cultural are
successive environments for the child to master. Motivation
comes from within the child; tasks are not socially or
culturally situated activities; other persons and social
mediation cease to be factors (until, perhaps, later in
development). What is lost in this view is that all three environments
are saturated with social and cultural meanings,
mediated through semiotic systems, that precede the child's
birth. Furthermore, it is these systems that enable the idea of
the child, and indeed of a specific child, to precede
his/her own birth, in a sense, as he/she exists first in the
networks of parents, family, and societal and
cultural institutionsand only later in the material world.
These are as profound an influence on development as
any other environmental affordances but it is less clear
how these affordances influence neuronal selection.
As for Freud, his use of biology to emphasis
sexuality, competitive struggle and reproduction make him
a natural ally in the new biological perspective, with
its overarching rationale of the selective pressure of
reproductive advantage (e.g., Barkow, Cosmides &
Tooby 1992, p.619).7 However, one can imagine that he
would still strive to explain die Spaltungen
of the mind: why some patterns become fixed and cut off from
future learning. In a letter to his friend in Berlin (Fliess)
Freud complained of his frustration in working on his
Project for a Scientific Psychology: "The 'Psychology' is really a
cross to me... After all, I wanted to do no more than
explain defence, but I was led from that into explaining
something from the centre of nature. I have had to
work through the problem of quality, sleep, memory in
fact, the whole of psychology" (1950 [1895] SE1,
p.284). Surely he would welcome the new discoveries on
the brain's functioning, such as on memory and
perception, and he could participate in those topics of his
original interestdefense and consciousnessstill so
poorly understood in the decade of the brain.
Concluding remarks
In the last years of his life Piaget attempted to modify
and strengthen his theory of development in response
to criticism from those who take a Vygotskian
perspective. Interestingly, this "new theory" (Beilin, 1992) has
not been received with enthusiasm by American
scholars (Acredolo, 1997). Perhaps, the time has passed for
that debate to be of interest here. So much of the
Piaget-Vygotsky debate is characterized by time-warps
that questions of timing (Zeitgeist) seem critical.
Vygotsky's 1934 response to Piaget's early books
resulting from his Paris period (1919-1921) only appeared
in English in 1962. By then Piaget had moved on to
a different methodology and had created an
elaborate theoretical perspective. The 1962 English translation
of Thought and Language arrived as Piaget was
being discovered in America. He would go on to build
a considerable following here at a timeduring the
Cold Warwhen it was hard to find an audience for
Vygotsky, a Marxist psychologist. During the 1970s when
"anti-Piagetian claims were a primary career path"
(Bickhard, 1997, p.239), Soviet activity theory became
increasingly popular. Now, that perspective on the
socio-cultural constructivism of subjectivity is becoming marginalized
by the rediscovery of the biological perspective on mind
and development.
I have tried to show how timing has been a factor:
in similarities between Freudian and Piagetian theories;
in subsequent theories that have arisen in critical
response; and lastly, in a rediscovery of Freud and Piaget
by cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists,
and others. Will the neo-darwinians succeed in
completing Freud's and Piaget's program? What will happen to
the post-freudians' and post-piagetians' agendas? Will
they proceed side by side as two "competing and
incommensurate approaches"; or will it be possible to
integrate 'explanation' and 'interpretation' (Bruner, 1997)?
Only time will tell, une fois de plus.
Notes Both Piaget and Lacan utilize Saussurean terminology for the sign,
but again to different ends. For Piaget, the increasing distance
between signifier and signified, accomplished as the semiotic function
develops during the sensorimotor stages, enables signs to represent
concepts already established through the child's actions. Only later
in development can language facilitate manipulation of concepts.
For Lacan, the distance between signifier and signified is necessary
for one's entrance into culture (the symbolic order) but that distance
also establishes a fundamental gap or rupture that keeps one's
desires constantly in search of satisfaction. In this, Lacan's embrace of
sexual motivation and the oedipus complex as formative of psychic
structure puts him squarely at odds with both
Piaget and the post-freudians. (Although this is clearly an interesting topic I am not aware of
any published material on the interface of these two scholars, Lacan
and Piaget.)
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Hans Furth died of a heart attack while hiking in the hills
of Virginia on Sunday, Nov. 7, 1999. Hans was never one
to dwell on death, certainly his own, but if he had
thought about the best way for his life to come to an end, it
would have been while he was energetically engaged,
probably in mid sentence. For us, it could have been better had
it been at the end of a sentence at the end of another
book rich with ideas yet unimagined by most of us. A
service celebrating Hans' life was held at the Human
Development Center, Catholic University of American, Washington DC.
Peter Pufall
June 1 - 3, 2000, Montréal Québec Canada
Situated on the cusp of a new millennium, this 30th Annual
Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society takes as its transitional object
the question of how persons, located in different times or places
or moments in their own intellectual history, come to hold
different beliefs about the nature of mind and personal identity. A panel
of distinguished plenary speakers (anthropologists,
developmentalists, intellectual historians, and philosophers of mind) will work to
bring out how alternative understandings of selfhood and distinctive
conceptions of mental life have cohered in history, culture, and
development.
Plenary speakers who will address the conference
theme include:
In addition, a set of invited symposia are planned.
Proposed speakers to date include:
The meeting will be held in the Hôtel Gouverneurs Place
Dupuis near the Université du Québec à Montréal. The address of
the hotel is:
Hôtel Gouverneurs Place Dupuis
Information concerning conference registraton and hotel
rates will be published on the JPS web site <www.piaget.org>
For those who submitted proposals for presentation at
the conference, letters of acceptance will be mailed in February.
Freud and Piaget: une fois de plus
180 North Michigan Avenue
Suite 2220, Chicago, Illinois 60601
Hans Furth passes away
30th Annual Meeting
David Moshman, Augusto Blasi, Michel Ferrari,
Chris Lalonde, Michael Mascolo
Kurt Fischer, Cathy Ayoub, Gil Noam
Lou Moses, John Flavell, Chris Moore, Daniel Povinelli,
Allison Gopnik
Eric Amsel, Augusto Blasi, Kurt Fischer, James Marcia,
David Moshman
1415 Saint-Hubert Street
Montréal, Québec, Canada H2L 3Y9
Tel: (514) 842-4881, Fax: (514) 842-1584
Toll free: 1-888-910-1111
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