Piaget, Jean (1896-1980)

PIAGET, JEAN (1896-1980)

Psychologist and theoretician of cognitive development Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. He died in Geneva on September 16, 1980.

Although renowned for his research on the development of intelligence and for his "genetic epistemology," Piaget was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis in his early career. In his autobiography, Piaget attributed this interest to his mother's instability and her "rather neurotic temperament."

By 1912, Piaget had already published taxonomic research on mollusks and developed a background in natural history; he then turned to philosophy. During World War I he went through a period of intellectual crisis dominated by Bergsonian mysticism, which combined Christian and socialist ideas. One of his first encounters with psychoanalysis occurred in 1916 on the occasion of a lecture on religion and Freudian theory in which Théodore Flournoy stated his agreement with the analytic theory of sublimation while asserting that it must respect the mystery surrounding the ultimate nature of religious phenomena. In Recherches, an autobiographical novel about his intellectual apprenticeship, Piaget adhered to the criticisms of Flournoy and the Zurich psychoanalysts; and in his theoretical speculations and analysis of his own character (a young man he identifies as himself) he gave a central role to the concepts of "autism" and "complex," terms that were originally defined and employed by Eugen Bleuler and the Zurich school. By recasting mystical thought in psychiatric terms, Piaget was able to claim that he both understood it and repudiated it.

Piaget spent the winter semester 1918-1919 at Zurich, where he attended lectures by Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung and seminars led by Oskar Pfister. While in Paris in the fall of 1919 he gave a lecture, "Psychoanalysis in Its Relations with Child Psychology"; this became his first publication in psychology and made him one of the first to introduce psychoanalysis to France. He emphasized the importance of psychoanalysis in pedagogy and moral education, but insisted that "unconscious mechanisms" are "the first states of conscious activity." He also indicated the direction of his early research: correlation of "unconscious development" and "mental development." In a flattering article published in 1920, Oskar Pfister fore-saw a bright future for Piaget as a psychoanalyst.

Piaget joined the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society in October 1920. In 1921 he was hired by the Institut Jean Jacques Rousseau in Geneva, founded byÉduard Claparède and managed by Pierre Bovet. His analyst was Sabina Spielrein, with whom he planned to do research (Vidal). Piaget attended the Seventh International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Berlin in 1922. Circa 1924 he analyzed a student pastor; he may have also have attempted to analyze the student's mother. He also wrote reports of psychoanalytic works for The Archives of Psychology.

During the 1920s Piaget developed the analogy between infantile thinking and "symbolic" or "autistic" thinking, remaining rather closer to his teacher Pierre Janet's psychology than to Freud's psychoanalysis. In elaborating parallels between intellectual and emotional development, Piaget critiqued the Freudian concepts of symbol, memory, and the unconscious. Near the end of his career, Piaget included "the cognitive unconscious" and "the affective unconscious" as a part of a generalized "unconscious" consistent with all that is not conceptualized (1973, p. 31ff).

Piaget retains a place in the history of psychoanalysis, especially in terms of the Genevan "genetic psychology," and in varied and diverse efforts to link psychoanalysis and the psychology of intelligence—as, for example, in terms of developmental object relations and the concept of object constancy.

Fernando Vidal

See also: Adaptation; Archives de psychologie, Les ; Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Psychoanalytic epistemology; Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris; Structuralism and psychoanalysis; Unconscious fantasy.

Bibliography

Pfister, Oskar. (1920). J. Piaget, "La psychanalyse et la pédagogie." Imago, 6, 3, 294-295.

Piaget, Jean. (1995). Psychoanalysis in its relations with child psychology. In Gruber, Howard E., and Vonëche, Jacques J. (Eds.). The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. (Original work published 1920)

——. (1973). Child and reality: Problems of genetic psychology. New York: Grossman.

Vidal, Fernando. (1994). Piaget before Piaget. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.