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52 Jean Piaget
select in the realm of psychology as the most experimental of our branches of
study.
A typical example is that of the various schools of psychoanalysis. Freud
discovered a number of new facts and interpretations, but they were not imme-
diately accepted, on account of their startling nature and of the new modes of
thought implicit in Freudianism as distinct from current mechanistic schools of
thought. But instead of trying to convince the psychologists and psychiatrists
by moving into their usual field of discussion, which would have been possible
if he had accepted the support of a number of like-minded thinkers such as E.
Bleuler, Th. Flournoy and others, Freud chose to work at the head of a team of
ready-found disciples and to pursue his own path without making any systemat-
ic attempt to come to an understanding with others. Because of this scientific
attitude, and also because they wished to protect their newly-emerging tech-
niques professionally, the Freudians founded an international psychoanalytic
society whose members were all trained by itself. The advantage of creating an
esprit d’kcole of this kind is of course that it enables specialists holding the same
principles to progress without constantly going back to initial problems. But this
has two disadvantages. First, if agreement is reached too rapidly, verification is
neglected, and this is the aspect of psychoanalysis that mainly held back experi-
mental psychologists who in other ways were interested in Freudian functional-
ism. Second, differences of opinion lead to the rise of new schools, and this is
what happened with Jung and Adler. At present the situation is evolving, and
for two reasons. The first is that some psychoanalysts have become aware of the
need for an experimental basis and for the linking of their theories with psycho-
logical theories in general; an example of this is the movement born of the work
of D. Rapaport at Stockbridge. The second reason is that there is an increasing
tendency among experimental psychologists to take over the main ideas under-
lying psychoanalysis rather than the details of Freudianism. The psychoanalyti-
cal ‘schools’ persist nonetheless, but with a marked and significant tendency to
separate into individual ‘clans’.
Another example of a different kind is found in the tendency noticeable in
American behaviourism for some time, to belittle research work that is under
suspicion of ‘mentalism’ or which refers more or less directly to the consciousness
of the subject. Behaviourism was brought to light by Watson, but is parallelled
in similar trends in many other parts of the world besides the USA (cf. Soviet
psychology with Pavlov, or French psychology with Pikron). The basic method
advocated by behaviourists in studying a subject is to start from the subject’s
behaviour as a whole, and not simply from his introspection. Seen from this
standpoint, the internal mechanisms of thought appear to be essentially the
product of the interiorization of actions themselves - of speech, once it is inter-
iorized, or of sensory-motor actions, and so on. But the characteristic feature of
the behaviourist school in its early days was to deny the very existence of thought,
except as a complex of verbal meanings, and to proscribe any reference to con-
sciousness. Thus theoretical extrapolations from a methodology valid in itself
became the characteristics of the development of this type of school, and it is
easy to understand that it may have been very advantageous to emphasize the