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

258 Jean Piaget
makes it possible to discern some of the coming developments in this branch of
research. On the one hand, it is not possible to separate the study of the memory
from that of development, since there is nothing innate about recall memory
which is ‘built up’ in relation to the semiotic function that conditions representa-
tion. True many psychoanalysts take this form of memory back to a much ear-
lier stage, but this view is not shared by most child psychologists. Some main-
tain that if we have no recollection of our birth and of our first year of life it is
not so much because it has been suppressed, but rather because there was not
yet any representative means of fixing memory images. On the other hand, the
problem of memory in the strict sense cannot be separated from that of the
retention of patterns.
8. Psychogenetic structuralismZ1 with reference to animals and children
and theories of the intelligence
The future of psychology will no doubt be determined chiefly by the develop-
ment of comparative and psychogenetic methods, for it is only by observing
the formation of behaviour and how it operates in animals and children (before
studying pre-perceptions and movements in plants) that its nature and the
way it operates in adults may be understood. However, it was some time before
what is now a common trend was understood, because for a long time it was
thought that children learned only what was inscribed in advance in an already
organized external world and especially what they were taught by adults. Yet the
two main lessons we have learnt from children are I) that the universe is organized
only inasmuch as its organization is reinvented step by step, with objects, space,
time and causality being structuralized in accordance with a logical form, and
2) that nothing is ever learnt from teachers unless their thought processes are
also followed through, failing which nothing remains, either in the mind or in
the memory (which as we have just seen, touch closely on each other). In short,
child psychology teaches us that development is a real constructive process,
over and above innatism and empiricism, and that it is a construction of struc-
tures and not an additive accumulation of isolated acquisitions.
I. It is first of all striking to note how the evolution of ethology, or animal
psychology, has passed through stages parallel to the evolution of child psy-
chology, and without any other direct influence either one way or the other, for
ethology is primarily the work of zoologists. After a phase of isolated observa-
tion, animal psychology was studied in the laboratory according to strictly asso-
ciationist principles (theories of learning). Then came the so-called ‘objectivist’
school, the objectiveness of which consisted in a return to study in nature itself,
i.e. in the indissociable complex of the organism plus the environment, with
analysis being conducted systematically. This led to the rediscovery of instinct
and to the uncovering of a wealth of new data showing the complexity of it.
Finally, the generation of those who founded this ethology in nature was follow-