Discussions on Child Development

Volume four

Barbel Inhelder, J. M. Tanner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136421440
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1960 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

PART I

PRECIRCULATED PAPERS

JEAN PIAGET

The General Problems of the Psychobiological Development of the Child¹

---

Having given most of the time at our previous meetings to the study of special problems of child development, we agreed to devote this fourth and last meeting to a discussion of the more general problems, such as the identification of the factors affecting development, of the stages of development and particularly of the mechanisms enabling the transition from one stage to another to be explained.

Each of us has already contributed a large number of data on these different points, but what is now required is a synthesis, harmonizing as far as possible the different viewpoints presented. I shall try to formulate this synthesis in such a way that each member of the Group can add to this preliminary paper, so that in the end a more complete picture can be obtained.

I. FACTORS AFFECTING DEVELOPMENT

Immediately on approaching this first great problem, it can easily be seen, on re-reading the discussions of the Study Group (Discussions on Child Development, Volumes I–III), that we did not keep to the simple and traditional distinction into three main factors of development:

(a) Hereditary factors, manifested in physical growth and especially in the maturing of the nervous system;

(b) The action of the physical environment (nutrition and the experience of handling objects), and

(c) The action of the social environment.

On the contrary, we constantly tried to overcome this dangerous partitioning and, if our respective contributions are carefully examined, it can be seen that we did so in three ways:

(1) by searching for interactions between these three factors;

(2) by searching for a common language making it possible to describe all three and to formulate their interactions more clearly;

(3) by recognizing either implicitly or explicitly the existence of a fourth factor, (d), additional to factors (a), (b) and (c), introducing new elements, while at the same time making it possible to co-ordinate them.

1. Search for interaction between factors (a), (b) and (c)

It might have been expected at first glance that the position taken by the members of the Group with regard to factors affecting development would be determined chiefly by the field in which they had made their own discoveries; for example that Lorenz would explain everything by innate mechanisms and the spontaneous activity of the nervous system; that Margaret Mead would explain everything by social factors and that Zazzo (as a disciple of Wallon) would base everything on the maturing of the nervous system and social factors, while underestimating the importance of the individual's actions in dealing with his experience.

However, the first result of the discussions of the Study Group, the first concrete element of the ‘synthesis’ which you have asked me to make, is that we are unanimous in considering that the three factors (a), (b) and (c) never occur independently of each other and that their interactions are consequently at least as important as their respective actions.

Below are some examples of this:

For the discussions on cerebral activity (EEG, etc.) I shall restrict myself to a quotation from Grey Walter (1953):

‘The crude division of all human attributes into “inherited” and “acquired” is excusable but quite unreasonable. Even in the simple models of behaviour we have described, it is often quite impossible to decide whether what the model is doing is the result of its design or of its experience. Such a categorization is in fact meaningless when use influences design, and design use.’

As regards Lorenz, I would recall the moment (which appeared decisive for him and myself) at the end of the discussions during the London meeting (see Volume II, p. 260 ff.) where he accepted and stressed my remark that there is no genotype which is not linked to a phenotype, where he discovered with surprise that I was by no means an empiricist (in the sense of explaining development and learning by experience alone) and where he briefly described what he termed his ‘dynamic apriorism’. Lorenz's dynamic apriorism, i.e. the concept of an internal activity of the organism developing in constant interplay with acquired experience, is not very far from development through constant interaction of internal and external factors which we ourselves describe as a continuous formation of structure by successive equilibrations (see Inhelder & Piaget, 1955).

As regards the psychoanalysts who, following Freud's early opinions, explained so much by instinct, I do not need to remind you of Bowlby's flexible and delicately inflected attitude, based on continued interaction between instinctive factors and individual experience as well as interindividual or social relations.

As regards the cultural and social aspect, we may recall how Margaret Mead, who proposed repeating in New Guinea certain of our intelligence tests (conservation, spatial relations, etc.) was in agreement with the theory according to which the stages of reactions to these tests might be the same as regards the order of succession, but might be very different as regards average ages or even the nonattainment of higher levels. And this implies that social factors are constantly interacting with other factors (physical experience, etc.) even in such a sphere as the organization of concepts, which is sometimes interpreted sociologically in a rather exclusive and rigid manner (Durkheim, etc.).

However, all this is self-evident. What is more exciting is to trace how the members of the Study Group, who are unanimous in considering the interactions between facts (a), (b) and (c) to be as important as the factors themselves, endeavoured to co-ordinate their viewpoints and to describe these interactions.

2. Search for a common language

In order to describe development ‘synthetically’ and, above all, to make some progress in the explanation of these general mechanisms, it is essential to have a common language. Indeed, without a common language we shall never succeed in analysing the actual interactions between the factors and will always return, despite ourselves, to a description by juxtaposition (or accumulation) of influences.

Let us imagine, for example, that some poor child has been studied by each of us for a month or a year and that we then meet to co-ordinate our results. We would know its brain rhythms, rates of physical growth, family conflicts, relations with its social environment, its reactions to problems of intelligence and to the 25 perceptive laboratory tests which my co-workers have already studied in children, the extent of its vocabulary, its drawings, etc., etc. However, and this is the tragedy of present studies on development, we would be incapable without a common language of achieving anything other than an enormous dossier consisting of a series of small mosaic-like chapters, complete with a concluding essay on the ‘personality’ of the child (with photographs) linking together with varying degrees of imagination a few facts taken from each of the preceding chapters. We would naturally make films and sound recordings to show how ‘alive’ all this is, but we would nevertheless continue, in the absence of a common language, each to tell his own separate little story in his own language, without making a real synthesis.

Of course, we have often worked like this during the meetings of the Study Group, but we also did something else and your unfortunate colleague given the task of making this synthesis had the great pleasure to find, on re-reading our reports, that very often we also made an effort to translate from one viewpoint into another and that at certain particularly decisive moments we even glimpsed what might be our common language, or the new language of the future….

I shall start with an example. During the last meeting, Erikson gave us a table of the elementary affective stages, going beyond a narrow Freudian framework, and endeavouring to characterize general forms of behaviour by bipolar links such as ‘giving-getting’, ‘autonomy-shame and doubt’, ‘initiative-guilt’, etc. (see Volume III, p. 168). It is clear that such a table, although it may be immediately usable by all those who have specialized in the affective development of the child, represents to those who have limited their field of study to questions of intelligence or thought only a collection of problems without any solution at present. Each of the criteria employed by Erikson could, naturally, also be applied to the field of learning and the structuration of knowledge. But instead of remaining well-defined, as in Erikson's field, they run the risk of becoming more and more vague the more general they become. Consequently, what we require is not a mere extension, with the risk of increasing inexactitude, but a translation into a common language. While Erikson was speaking, however, Grey Walter was looking for such a translation, of which he gave shortly afterwards a series of examples. Speaking from the viewpoint of ‘statistical neurophysiology’ he endeavoured to re-interpret Erikson's stages in the context of information theory and, even if we do not accept this parallelism in detail, we cannot help recognizing the fact that he made use of a much more general language, enabling more precise comparisons to be drawn between the various aspects of behaviour and in particular between its affective and cognitive aspects.

For example, the stage of ‘giving-getting’ with, as poles, ‘trust’ and ‘mistrust’, would correspond to an initial insufficiency of information, such that the elementary exchanges ‘giving-getting’ are accompanied from the viewpoint of the ‘baby-computer’ by a degree of approximation large enough to make the system less precise and consequently more ‘trusting’. Similarly, a certain particular type of learning would correspond to the next of Erikson's stages and so on.

The details of such analogies produced on the spur of the moment by Grey Walter are of little importance. Their great significance is to show that one of us who works continually with mechano-physiological models was able to give, in terms of probability of information, an immediate translation rendering the stages of affective development still clearer for those of us concerned with intelligence or with learning.

In fact, this probabilistic language is clearly the common language that we are looking for, provided that the information and communication schemata are supplemented by introducing the concept of ‘strategy’ and the terminology of the theory of games. In this broadened form the probabilistic language may be suitable for all of us. In the first place, its generality makes it possible to establish fairly direct correspondence between the mechano-physiological models and the various forms of behaviour observed in the psychology of the cognitive functions. In the second place, it is not restricted to describing the information as such, under its cognitive aspect, but, by introducing the concept of gain and loss it provides a means of analysing the ‘economics’ of forms of behaviour. It is without doubt this ‘economics’ of forms of behaviour which constitutes the most natural transition between their affective aspect (which can always be translated in terms of enrichment and impoverishment) and their cognitive aspect. In the third place, it enables certain isomorphisms to be found between models of intra-individual operations and inter-individual or social ones and this makes it possible to by-pass the over-simplified and crude antithesis of the individual and the social factors, which is as much a drawback for the theory of development as the distinction between ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’.

3. Recognition of a fourth factor (d) of development

As soon as we adopt this broader viewpoint, as imposed on us by the search for a common language, we perceive that there exists a fourth factor, more general than the three classic factors of innateness, physical experience and social environment, and obeying its own special laws of probability and the minimum: this is the factor of equilibrium which is found associated with each of the three preceding ones, but which governs particularly their interactions and which, moreover, reveals itself frequently in an independent manner.

To give an idea of what such independence may signify, let us take an entirely theoretical example but one which has the advantage of posing the problem in one of its most general biological forms. We may suppose that in the course of development certain sectors of the organism can be considered as a closed system and are found to obey the second law of thermo-dynamics. In this case the constant increase in entropy, tending towards that state of equilibrium which is maximum entropy, would constitute neither an innate mechanism nor an acquisition in terms of environment, but the result of a purely probabilistic mechanism. We may suppose, on the contrary (like Helmholtz, Guye, etc.) that physical development does not obey the second law. In this case the state of equilibrium towards which growth tends would be characterized by a system of regulations controlling chance; and the overall form of this system would constitute a factor leading to a better understanding of developmental theory than any number of details of various hereditary, acquired or social factors.

To return to concrete problems which are apparently completely different in each of our many fields of investigation, it is very striking to observe how the equilibrium problem constantly recurs, either explicitly or implicitly, in each field which we are studying.

To begin with social factors: even if we accept the great plasticity which Margaret Mead attributes to mental characteristics under the influence of various communities, nevertheless society is not the source of the nervous system, and consequently the many more or less stable reactions which we observe in the different communities constitute more or less complex forms of equilibrium between the psycho-physiological aptitudes of the individual and the actions of the environment. Thus it is not by chance that in the book entitled Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, Parsons & Bales (1955) particularly stress states of equilibrium and of disequilibrium, and the double equilibrium peculiar to the internal system of the personality and the system of social exchanges (see in particular a formalized diagram of these equilibrium systems in Appendix B of above, by Morris Zelditch, Jr).

In the field of affective development it would be particularly interesting to translate social and dynamic psychoanalysis, as understood by Bowlby or Erikson, into the language of equilibrium. It is clear, for example, that the Oedipus stage represents a certain form of affective equilibrium, characterized by a maximization of the ‘gains’ expected from the mother and by a minimization of the ‘losses’ expected from the father. In this connexion it would be of interest to examine whether the equilibrium point corresponds merely to a Bayes strategy, the criterion of which would be a simple maximum of ‘gain minus loss’, or whether it corresponds to a ‘minimax’ strategy, with a search for the minimum or the maximum loss which the subject supposes a hostile environment is trying to inflict on him. It is evident that a problem such as this cannot be treated in general since it depends for its solution on the overall environmental conditions for each child.

Besides these problems of ‘cross-sectional’ equilibrium at any given moment raised by each of the essential phases of affective development, there remains also the essential problem of the equilibrium between the previous affective schemata of the subject and the exigencies of the present position.

From the mechano-physiological viewpoint, the part played by the concept of equilibrium, and especially progressive equilibrium, is particularly important. This is because of the perspectives it opens up not only as regards the process of problem-solving and of what Ashby calls the ‘finalized mechanisms’, but also as regards the general lines of development of the cognitive functions. An apparatus which solves problems by a succession of approximations based on a series of feedbacks shows in the most decisive manner the part played by the concepts of disequilibrium and of progressive equilibration. As long as there is disequilibrium, i.e. while the problem still remains unsolved, a new negative feedback is set off, whereas the attainment of the correct solution is marked by the production of a state of equilibrium. Furthermore, successive approximations to the solution correspond to a progressive equilibration in accordance with a series of steps. These steps can be thought of as corresponding to phases in the processes of adult problem-solving (‘Aktualgenese’), or even to stages in the dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Child Development
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Members of Study Group
• Preface
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Part I. Precirculated Papers
• Part II. Discussion
• References
• Index