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252 Jean Piaget
ics, in which cathexis does nothing but switch and invest its ‘charge’, changing
from one object to another, and he makes interesting comparisons between his
conception of Freudianism and our own views on the ‘feeding’ of sensori-motor
patterns. His pupil Wolff has continued to work on these comparisons between
the sensori-motor development of the child and that of the ‘Iibido’.I9
To sum up, we can thus see the trends that have developed from an initially
entirely reductionist school, and that the gradual realization of the interactions
between the cognitive and the affective, the individual and the social and the
partly mental and the biological leads to constructivism, which is essential to
the understanding of development as a whole.
7. The specificity of behaviour and the structures of memory
In its search for a specific standpoint between the organic and the social, psychol-
ogy turned towards the study of behaviour in particular, which satisfied posi-
tive-minded persons who were suspicious of introspection and even more of an
unconsciousness that was reconstructed only indirectly. We have already spoken
about behaviour in section I in connexion with positivist trends that rejected
any kind of ‘explanation’. Behaviour, however, can be analysed from various
standpoints. There are in particular great American theories of learning, the
best known of which are those of Hull and Tolman, which, in contrast with
Skinner’s viewpoint, are intended to be explanatory, while at the same time they
reject organicist reductions, which are judged to be either premature or to go
beyond the scope of psychology, as is the case of Pavlovian reflexology.
It is interesting to show that once the reductionist approach has been dis-
carded in order to determine in behaviour as such the specificity of the psycholog-
ical phenomenon, a constructivist approach is being taken. This is to say that
in seeking to explain how new behaviour patterns are formed, one ends up by
referring to partly endogenous constructions inasmuch as the behaviour patterns
are not contained or preformed in the former, and that once this constructivist
course has been taken, sooner or later one is obliged to resort to a structuralism,
i.e., to the hypothesis of overall forms comprising their self-regulation or their
operators, in contrast to interpretations of an atomistic type.
I. The transition from the theories of Hull to those of Tolman is already very
significant in this respect. The presuppositions of Hull are clearly empiricist, not
in the sense of Skinner’s postivism (since Hull is not afraid of the intermediate
variables between the stimulus S and the reaction R, though he recognizes that
they are inferred), but in the sense that in his view the innovation of acquired
behaviour patterns is solely due to the facts of experience, and therefore to the
connexions provided in the environment and of which the SR associations con-
stitute a kind of ‘functional copy’. However, these SR associations do not simply
accumulate by addition, since structured wholes are formed that Hull calls the
‘hierarchical families of habits’. This is to say that a habit already formed for
itself can become a segment of a wider habit, and therefore a means in the serv-