Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

250 Jean Piaget
tion, one trend being concerned with sexual life and remaining faithful to the
identifying reductionism of Freud, and the other with the ego and conscious
thought and leading to constructivism and structuralism.
It is in fact possible to distinguish six different trends in contemporary analytical
thinking, and it is worth going over them as there are some divergences of
doctrine that cast quite an interesting light on the complexity of psychological
interpretation and on the difficulties that constructivist structuralism has in
gaining general acceptance, even though’ it may be in accordance with the most
general present-day trends.
III. I) The fist of these trends is in some respects regressive and in effect lays
even greater emphasis on the reductionist character of the Freudian doctrine.
This approach is that of the MBlanie Klein school, which takes the image as the
almost hallucinatory realization of desires, memory in the form of memory ima-
ges and the various Freudian complexes even further back than before. But
writers who do not belong to this Kleinian sub-school of thought find that the
infant thus becomes curiously assimilable to the ‘miniature adult’ which has
constantly been denounced by non-psychoanalytic child psychology as a prod-
uct similar to those of preformism in embryology.
2) The second tendency, like some of the following trends, is adopted by
authors who are not content to reconstruct the stages of development on the
basis of a few clinical observations (or, like Freud himself, childhood memories
revived by adults undergoing treatment), but who carry out experimentation prop-
erly so-called, which is something new in psychoanalysis. They include E. Kris,
Spitz and K. Wolf, Th. Benedek and Th. Gouin-Dkarie. Their basic idea is
that development consists of constructions as such affecting the ego and that
there is a correlation between the stages in the manifestations of the libido and
the stages in the development of the ego. In the development of the infant, for
instance, a first stage will be distinguished at which he is centred on himself but
still without any differentiation of the ego in relation to other persons and ob-
jects, the environment being known only through the activities of the subject.
A second stage is reached when expectation responses and certain privileged
perceptions (smiles) introduce the beginning of a boundary, though shifting,
between activity proper and ‘intermediate objects’ like the ‘smiling human face’
(Spitz). Lastly, a third stage is reached when there is a firm differentiation be-
tween the subject and the object and a consequent consciousness of the ego and a
‘cathexis investing truly libidinal objects’, or an object-directed fixation of affec-
tivity on the mother, and so on. As a result of experiments carried out on go
babies, when she adopted our findings concerning the cognitive formation of
the permanent object (looking for the object after it has disappeared from sight
behind a screen, which is by no means innate), Th. Gouin-DBcarie was able to
show a fairly good correlation between our stages and those of pre-objectaliand
then objectal affectivity (though only relatively, because although it was con-
firmed that the cognitive stages followed a constant order, those of the ‘libido’
are not so sequential and reversals occur). We are therefore on the way to con-
structivism.