Early Child Development in the French Tradition

Contributions From Current Research

Andre Vyt, Henriette Bloch, Marc H. Bornstein

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138968073
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134772452
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume shares significant contemporary "Francophone" contributions to developmental psychology outside geographic and intellectual borders of French-speaking countries. Except for the spread of Piagetian theory after World War II into Anglophone psychology, these new publications have not become so well known worldwide as progress in Francophone developmental psychology warrants. However, the work of a new generation of developmental theorists and experimentalists continues to shape important and original lines of thinking and research in France, Canada, and in other French-speaking countries. This work also contributes uniquely to issues such as sensori-motor development, perception, language acquisition, social interaction, and the growth and induction of cognitive mechanisms.

Scientific concepts are not only embedded in a paradigm, but also in a culture and a language. Instead of writing about Francophone developmental psychology from "outside," this volume brings together original English-language contributions written by researchers working in different Francophone countries. Chapters summarize and interpret research on a given topic, making explicit the context of philosophical and theoretical traditions in which the empirical advances are embedded. Original essays are accompanied by editorial commentaries from eminent scientists working on the same topics in other parts of the world -- topics that are closely related to Francophone streams of thought and themes of study. Together, these essays fully and faithfully represent modern scientific perspectives toward understanding many facets of mental growth and development of the young child.

1

An Introduction to Francophone Research and Thinking in Developmental Psychology

Henriette Bloch

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes—CNRS

Andre Vyt

University of Ghent—NFSR

Marc H. Bornstein

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Paris and the Beginnings of Francophone Developmental Science

The seminal notions that have emerged from French-language publications in the area of human development, and that form what can be termed the “French tradition,” are, of course, not solely French. Although they emerged in Paris in the early part of the 20th century, and made Paris one of the most stimulating centers for developmental science, they have always been international. (After World War II, the Genevan School for Piagetian research took on a more important role, and Montreal began attracting a growing number of research teams.) For more than 50 years—between 1882, when Jean Martin Charcot won over the Academy of Sciences, and 1937, when he described hysteria and the XIth International Congress of Psychology was held in honor of Pierre Janet—Paris was home to the brightest constellation of developmental psychologists of that era. During this period, Paris was the meeting place for Sigmund Freud and James Mark Baldwin, who both attended Charcot’s lectures at the Salpétrière Hospital. Later, Baldwin, Henri Wallon, and Jean Piaget spent time together when Piaget began to work under the direction of Theodore Simon, Alfred Binet’s main collaborator. It was the Sorbonne that housed the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which gathered in one place all the contemporary research in psychology: Binet’s laboratory was directed by Henri Piéron in 1912, and was site of the first chair of child psychology, which was created for Baldwin in 1913 and later passed on to Wallon, when Baldwin retired in 1929. These developmental psychologists maintained constant contact with researchers in other fields and at other institutions. Every 2 weeks, many took part in the scientific session of the French Society of Psychology, which was open to other sciences such as biology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and history. From the outset, then, French developmental psychology was part of a broad common network incorporating other disciplines. Nothing comparable could be found in other Francophone cities at that time: In Geneva, genetic psychology was dominant under Edouard Claparède, but it was relatively isolated. In Louvain, development retained the personal interest of Albert Michotte, but was viewed as merely a component of general psychology without any unique importance.

The crucial ingredient in the success that was achieved was not geography, however, but a common goal. At this time, French thought was pervaded by Positivism and was also influenced by the writings of Claude Bernard. Nascent genetic psychology professed a cautious opinion regarding Positivism, but it was encouraged to adhere to experimental laws set down by Claude Bernard. It is this that prompted Baldwin to assert, as early as 1895, that scientists who study development must do more than conduct good observations. He suggested they go beyond the “sophisticated cogitations of the adult” to become “psychologists of the nursery” and focus attention on the “clumsy movements of the infant” (Baldwin, 1902, p. 413). Above all, they needed to build theories: “Give us theories”, he proclaimed, “more theories, yet more theories” (Baldwin, 1905, p. 192). His appeal was heeded by Wallon and by Piaget, who were guided to search for general laws and processes of development rather than for mechanisms of specific mental functions. According to Baldwin, both Wallon and Piaget placed themselves in an evolutionary perspective, and viewed the study of child development as psychobiology, with a meaning similar to the one Hall and Oppenheim (1987) defined only recently. The notions they derived from biology were characteristic of this orientation: accommodation, used by Baldwin to account for “circular reactions”; assimilation, strongly associated with Piaget; and maturation, expanded on simultaneously by both Wallon and Gesell. Obviously, this choice of orientation distanced these European developmentalists from Behaviorism and prompted the epithet of “mentalists,” which they were not.

Such theoretical positions distracted Wallon and Piaget from psychometry, although they were both involved in the development of psychodiagnostic tools. The young Piaget originally came to Paris in 1919 to participate in an extensive revision of the Binet–Simon Scale of Intelligence. This provided him with an opportunity to observe a large sample of children and to talk with them. These observations served as the source of Piaget’s first paper in psychology, which was devoted to the development of the notion of “part of a whole,” and published in 1921. Wallon and Piaget both benefitted from the work of Binet. They adhered to his method of questioning children and adopted some of his views on the development of logical thinking. They did not, however, follow Binet’s interest in individual differences, and they never accepted psychometrical reductionism.

Rather, Wallon and Piaget appear to have been influenced more by Janet’s ideas. Janet’s impact on French developmental psychology can be seen in the notion of the hierarchical architecture of behavior, in which different levels of nervous control harmonize in the normal adult. Developmentalists hypothesized that this harmony was shaped over time and that ontogenetic studies could not only reveal the successive strata of the architecture and its pathological dissociations, but also could point to their diachronic links or filiation. This orientation led Wallon and Piaget to emphasize general organization over local constellations of responses, and to entertain the notion of invariant features across time, rather than transitory instantaneous adjustments. The concept of structure is foreshadowed by this approach, and was to take on different forms in Wallon’s and Piaget’s formulations. For both Wallon and Piaget, development proceeded by integrative succession of general organizations, qualitatively different from each other, such that development could not be truly represented as cumulative improvement. This was in sharp contrast with the psychometric approach. Within this frame, their views of the diachronic process diverged: It was considered less linear in Wallon’s theory than in Piaget’s. Wallon (1941) considered the onset of a structure as a shift from a preceding dominant and antagonistic orientation, which he called the principle of functional alternation. Piaget considered a structure to be an equilibrated state covering the components of the preceding organization.

Piaget remarked at Wallon’s death that, as researchers, they could be seen as quite complementary. Piaget focused his work on cognition; Wallon explored both the affective and the cognitive aspects of activity. Notwithstanding their different foci, their views on early development now appear closer than has generally been thought: Both considered that the achievement of a first structure of thinking is attained halfway through the second year of life, when by acting and perceiving the infant elaborates means–ends relations. This allows the infant to move and act within a homogeneous space and to consider objects in the external environment independent of the actor. Their methods disconcerted experimentalists, who favored a psychology of measurement, because both Piaget and Wallon combined open questioning of the child with controlled situations and experimental manipulations, and because they did not use statistics.

First Wallon, then gradually Piaget, and finally (if indirectly) Baldwin influenced French developmental psychology through their lectures and writings far beyond the “golden” prewar era, and even beyond their deaths (Wallon died in 1962, Piaget died in 1980). Wallon’s transactionalist ideas avant-la-lettre provided firm ground for studies in parent–infant interaction, but because of neglect in this area of study, it was some time before researchers revisited the issue with sufficiently large samples (e.g., Lézine, 1955, 1964). The research policies of successive French governments focusing on the effects of day care at a time when increasing numbers of women began to work inhibited fundamental research on parent-infant interaction. In the meantime, Piaget divided his time between Geneva and Paris. In 1952, he accepted a part-time but permanent position at the University of Paris as an invited professor, a position he held until 1966. His lectures had a direct impact on entire generations of future psychologists, among them some contributors to this book. After the war, he founded the Centre d’Epistemologie Génétique in Geneva, which attracted, over the years, scientists from every part of the world including, of course, many French researchers. Up to his last years, Piaget participated in the French scientific forum. Many of his books and all the volumes from the Centre were originally brought to press by Parisian publishers.

During that time, neither Wallon’s nor Piaget’s dominant influence was seriously challenged by new ideas coming from different philosophical streams. The phenomenology defended by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the existentialist ideas, which changed the Weltanshauung of many people and put Jean-Paul Sartre in the spotlight, had no substantial effect on developmental psychology. The first major influence from other disciplines after World War II came with advances in brain neurophysiology and with new techniques of behavioral investigation in the 1960s.

It was and still is a feature of the French tradition to be attentive and open to external contributions. Eliane Vurpillot, for example, introduced J. J. Gibson’s theses on perception and Eleanor Gibson’s ideas on differentiation in cognitive development to the French scientific community. René Zazzo kept close ties to Arnold Gesell and the so-called “naturalistic” studies, and later introduced Bowl-by, Winnicott, and Harlow to his students in a booklet called L’Attachement (1974).

International Influences

Jean Piaget is undoubtedly one of the most important theoreticians in developmental studies even today. Whatever the relative contributions of non-Piagetian psychology, Piaget established the framework for infant development for French-language psychology. All work in infant development was to be interpreted within the Piagetian system of stages and mechanisms of development. That this system was essentially the only reference for discussing these mechanisms was clear at the 1954 European meeting on the notion of developmental stages.

In the early 1950s, however, Piagetian theory was still under-assimilated in the United States and English-speaking Canada. As Ricard et al. (this volume) point out, this is readily explained by a number of factors. It was the last volume of Piaget’s trilogy that was the first to be translated into English, namely Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (1945/1951). This work could not be fully understood without the knowledge of The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1936/1952) and The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937/1954), which were translated only later. Also, Piaget used a lexicon of scientific concepts from other fields of study in a highly idiosyncratic way, which further distanced outsiders. Comparable misunderstandings, fostered by problems in interpretation, also occurred with the introduction of psychoanalysis into Anglo Saxon schools of thought: The German term Triebe was translated simply as instincts, a notion that was unacceptable in French schools of psychoanalysis. Beyond the language barrier between French and English, Piaget had used the clinical method (without any statistical measures) at a time when experimental psychology was resorting more and more to statistical formalization. Even today, the term Piagetian is as idiomatic as Freudian or Pavlovian.

While Piaget became more and more prominent on the international stage, Baldwin was underevaluated or ignored—Boring (1929/1957) called him a philosopher—and Wallon received scarcely any attention outside French-speaking countries. His compliance with dialectical materialism—despite his being very critical of Marxism as a total philosophical position—implied a belief that people and nature could not be studied as isolated elements; that was in agreement with some American ideas about education. Moreover, Wallon kept to the Darwinian notion of the living milieu—rather than just objects or stimuli— being the primary setting of influence for human development (Bloch, 1993). His socio-constructivistic view of the development of self-other differentiation influenced René Spitz in the latter’s search for an interpretation of infant reactions to maternal loss (Spitz & Wolf, 1946).

Contemporary Francophone Research

A tradition of research in developmental psychology can develop by identifying basic ideas, methods, or schools of thought or by focusing on specific age periods or domains of behavior. A basic feature of Francophone research is that it centers mainly on early childhood, and more specifically on infancy and its sensorimotor organization and cognition (see, e.g., Bloch, 1990). Other areas of research are far from excluded, however. Here we briefly review the contributions of the four different sections in this volume.

Structuralist and Functionalist Views of Mental Functioning

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work on education, first published in 1762, is widely recognized as having paved the way for a specific French scientific approach to child development by introducing the view that infants are qualitatively different from adults. He, and later Claparède, postulated a set of fundamental principles about the development of behavior. The law of genetic succession, the notion of orderly and qualitatively different stages in development, and the law of functional autonomy, which emphasizes organization, adequateness, and adaptivenes of behavior at the various stages of child development, became cornerstones of Piagetian theory and of the structuralistic approach to cognitive development.

As de Schonen and Deruelle remark (chap. 3), it has become obvious that the emergence of a new cognitive ability in infants cannot be accounted for simply by the functional onset of action by a group of neurons that have remained silent up to that point. We must discover how learning mechanisms and neural maturation cooperate and are correlated with age-related behavioral changes.

Rochat and Bullinger (chap. 2) have revised our approach to sensorimotor organization by examining dynamic interaction among physiological maturation, posture, and functional action. Bodily posture is both a scaffolding canalization and also a burden, in the case of postural immaturity. Several studies have revealed new sensorimotor patterns when natural biomechanical constraints on the child are lifted, as demonstrated by Grenier’s innovative neuropediatric technique (see Amiel-Tison & Grenier, 1980). Also, infants adjust their posture according to regularities in the environmental circumstances they experience and adjust their functional activity according to what position they are in. A clear example, cited by the authors, is the instinctual behavior of sucking, which is shaped by early feeding experiences (Alegria & Noirot, 1982; Bullinger & Rochat, 1984).

De Schonen and Deruelle (chap. 3) introduce a neuropsychological approach to perceptual-cognitive development in examining hemispheric lateralization processes in pattern and face recognition. As they note, it was only quite recently that interest developed in hemispheric differences ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. An Introduction to Francophone Research and Thinking in Developmental Psychology
• Part I: Sensorimotor Development and Perception
• Part II: Socio-Cognitive Development
• Part III: Verbal and Communicative Development
• Part IV: Interaction and Development
• Author Index
• Subject Index