Re: [xmca] Piaget's Periods

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

I think Piaget found he had inadvertently boxed himself into a corner when he started to have children, and to have the opportunity to study infancy on an ongoing basis. He had argued that preschool age children are egocentric, even autistic, and that only social interaction, based on language, can transform this. Now he was faced with little babies who had no language at all. This must mean, surely, that they were in an even worse condition, and indeed Piaget (in the 1927 'milestone' paper) proposed that the infant is "solipsistic." One can see that he was not entirely happy with his own formulation, and he struggled to explain how solipsism can characterize a being that has no sense of self, but he stuck with it. But even a infant learns and develops, and seeing this forced Piaget to propose a new mechanism or process of development. He had been talking of assimilation for a long time, as David noted. But now he started to talk for the first time of "accommodation," and we see the birth of what has been called the dynamic duo, the Batman and Robin, of Piagetian theory.

In short, Piaget completely failed to see the "Great We" of infancy; the fact that the infant is necessarily wound in a web of social activity, without which it would not only not develop, it would not even survive. I suspect that while Jean was observing the infants, dangling his key fob in front of their eyes, it was Madame Piaget who fed them, changed them, clothed them, bathed them and burped them. As is sadly often the case, to a male researcher this women's work was completely invisible, and its importance for the children went unrecognized.

Martin

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