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498 Jean Piaget
the positive side or fatigue, depression, etc., on the negative side) and to its
terminations (rejoicing in the case of success, sadness in that of failure). This
suggests that elementary affective life expresses behaviour adjustments, but
what kinds of adjustments (for these may be structural or cognitive)? Janet
explicitly puts forward the hypothesis of a reserve of physiological forces which
are stored, used up or reconstituted in accordance with variable rhythms, and
suggests that it is these forces which affectivity regulates in accordance with a
‘behaviour economy’ co-ordinating gains and losses of energy. Going on to
generalize at the inter-individual level, Janet analyzes sympathy and antipathy
from this point of view, people for whom one feels sympathy being energy
sources or excitants and those for whom one feels antipathy being tiring or
‘costly’.
This brings us to a first problem: does affectivity as ’investment’ or as a
series of regulations depending on gains and losses actually modify structures
or does it merely ensure their functioning in terms of energy?Some authors
believe the former, arguing that the systematic defect of ‘investment’ characteristic
of schizophrenics who are not interested in reality leads to a schematic
and pathologically formal type of thought, while the ‘over-investments’ of
paranoiacs lead to loss of reason (delusions of grandeur, etc.). Other authors
(including the writer) think that a child with a lively interest in arithmetic and
another suffering from multiple complexes regarding itself will both recognize
that two and two make four and not three or five, because activity makes structures
function by accelerating or retarding their formation but without modifying
them; and that the behaviour difficulty in a schizophrenic or a paranoiac
can simultaneously affect structures and their affective functioning according
to a dynamic which always involves both aspects at But of course
it remains possible that a distinction should be made between structures whose
form determines the content (logico-mathematical structures) and those
whose content depends on a variety of values, although in a ‘value judgement’
the form (or judgement) is structural and therefore cognitive and the content is
relative to affectivity precisely as a value.
The second problem, however, is even more important and concerns all the
human disciplines to a still greater extent, namely that of the multiplicity of
values or of their reduction to their energetic ‘economic’ (in the praxeological
sense) dimension alone. When the economist speaks of production, exchange,
consumption, reserves or investments, etc., we see clearly enough that these
terms recur in exactly the same form in every field, including that of the affectivity
of infants before all language (in terms of expenditure or recovery of
energies, ‘investing’ in objects or people, etc.); but it remains to be knownwhether
the meanings involved are always comparable. And it is impossible to attempt
a classification without immediately finding that it applies to all the sciences of
man (certainly including linguistics, if only because F. de Saussure drew his
inspiration from economics and because the ‘affective language’ described by
Ch. Bally gave rise to a theory of values by the sociologist G. Vaucher).
As an introduction to this classification (in section I I) we should first recall
that in the sphere of individual as well as inter-individual values there exists a