Psychology and psychiatry continue to reign supreme. They are part and parcel of our unashamedly pagan climate, our “upper middle-class Western intellectual world,” as it is sometimes called in one knowing swoop. There is nothing else, there can be nothing else, but further explorations deeper into the unconscious or higher into the sky or faster over land. We do not want salvation or redemption or damnation. We want “meaning” (better, “creative meaning”). We, of course, are the thousands of well-fed, well-educated, practical but sincere American citizens, who ponder issues, decide among “positions,” and in general consider the world a difficult place, all right, but by no means an impossible one-to understand, to live in, to take very seriously, to change in all those ways, “significantly” or “basically” or “permanently.” One might go on to suspect that Freud-so stubbornly and blindly unfriendly to religion-distrusted America because he knew that even he would not escape America’s capacity (its “need” as it is put today) to make a religion out of almost anything, and most assuredly out of psychoanalytic psychiatry. 

Unfortunately for them, secular religions don’t last very long. One follows another, and each time the heady, exuberant period of discovery has to give way before the inevitable disenchantment that comes when-the next seer arrives on the scene. It makes no difference how “valid” and worthwhile the “old” ideas are. When knowledge becomes a sacred object, the man who has set the knowledge forth becomes a god; and perhaps Western intellectuals are still Jewish enough, still Christian enough, to be able to accept only one god at a time. Each seer, then, has his moment. All eyes are on him. Criticism becomes strangely muted-sometimes (as in Christian history) after an initial period of public scorn and disbelief. Soon disciples appear: they have worked with the Man; they and they alone misunderstand Him; He trained them; He was their friend, their “master,” as Hans Sachs—a grown-up man—called Sigmund Freud. 

In some cases institutions emerge, places where His thought is studied, where men are “admitted” to do that study.  In other instances the Man exerts His influence less formally but no less effectively. The ideas of other men are made to pass the muster of His name, whether those men wish it to happen or not, whether in fact they have read a word of His or not. They become Marxists, Freudians, Jungians; or they become followers of Levi-Strauss, members of Piaget’s “school.” And the followers and disciples fight one another with missionary passion and zeal. A particular truth is not something known, a vision that for the moment works, that for a while makes things clearer, lends them a certain order. A truth is considered the Truth; it must be fiercely possessed, pitted against other truths, made an adversary, a combatant, a commanding source of loyalty. And I suppose it has to be asked: on a lonely planet, full of every conceivable kind of injustice, rampant with murder and hunger and brutality (among the well-educated and “civilized,” too), why not worship this Man, that Idea? It is only a second we are here, and surely we deserve Someone, Something near, tangible, concrete, specific, explicitly promising. 

All of this I have to say before I discuss the work of Jean Piaget-whose ideas the interested American reader can now find pinpointed in the book, Six Psychological Studies (Random House, $4.95), essays collected and published in English for the first time. I do so in no way to accuse Piaget or Freud or anyone else. No gifted thinker can escape the effects of what are in fact two universal, utterly common sins, the wish to be God, and failing that, the desire to make a God, find One that others don’t yet know. For that matter, even if Freud and Piaget were Gods, the idolatrous excesses of their worshipers could not be prevented, as anyone who has studied the history of the various religions well knows. In any event, neither Freud nor Piaget deserves the “treatment” he has received from the “public”-a treatment that in Pia-get’s case is perhaps on the ascendancy even as Freud’s “influence” wanes. (All of which may be a very good thing for Freud and his ideas, a very poor one for Piaget and his.) 

Intelligence and Environment 

Before we mention the various uses to which Piaget is now being put, we had best look at what the man has actually tried to do. Like Freud, he has been an incredibly prolific man, a brilliant observer and a leader around whom followers themselves gifted have gathered. He was born in Neuchatcl, Switzerland, some 200 miles northeast of Geneva, where he has lived and worked for many years. His first interest was in zoology—later extended to natural science and philosophy, in both of which he received doctorates. He has never really abandoned those interests, even though he is now best known by teachers and child psychologists. He evidently considers himself an epistemologist—of a certain kind. He has wanted to document the way man, a physical being, acquires knowledge, starting at birth and moving up the years. He has championed direct observation of children, rather than (what some psychoanalysts cling to) retrospective statements about childhood based on the fantasies and memories of adults who are patients. He has insisted upon a genetic and developmental view of knowledge: we learn about the world by having concrete experiences with it; and the more of those experiences we have, the more we know, the more “real” is our contact as individuals with the environment. He has been much concerned with intelligence, and with his associates has published some 200 studies on the psychology of intelligence, including over 20 books and many monographs. The titles of his books give some clue to his interests: The Language and Thought of the Child, Judgement and Reasoning in the Child, The Child’s Conception of the World, The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality, The Moral Judgement of the Child, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, and his grand L’Epistemologie Genetique. 

The six essays in Piaget’s new book are meant to give a glimmer of what he has been trying to demonstrate, and despite the fact that like all of his work, the essays seem preoccupied with children, learning and intelligence, it is safe to say that the “heart of the matter” is elsewhere, in the exquisite tension that a biologically-minded philosopher finds between the inside of man’s thoughts and fantasies and the outside of man’s physical surroundings and social atmosphere. In this sense Piaget is exactly like Freud-who also started out as a biologist, a ncurophysi-ologist to be exact, and who also saw his later psychological interests as part of a much wider and more ambitious pursuit (a philosophical one, even though he shunned the word because he wanted to be “scientific”). Neither man has allowed himself to forget that the mind is part of the body-and if that seems like the purest and most evident kind of common sense, it is a common sense that many psychologists and psychiatrists have long since forgotten or transcended. 

To Freud, man is driven by inborn instincts. To Piaget, man from his first day on this earth has “inborn reflex mechanisms” which progressively and relentlessly emerge and then become integrated, one to another, in the face of experience after experience. The baby meets up with an object or an event or a person behaving in a particular way, and step-by-step the reflexes in the child come to terms with what happens outside him. The development of intelligence itself is a part of man’s biological adaptation to the environment-though once man has become intelligent, has learned how to deal with objects, has learned about space and time and causality and logic, he has apparently set something else going: “Intelligence constitutes an organizing activity whose functioning extends that of the biological organization while surpassing it due to the elaboration of new structures.” 

The word “structures” leaps out at us today, even though Piaget wrote it in 1936. Suddenly Levi-Strauss and Structuralism have become topical, influential, important. I suppose we can certainly call Piaget a structuralist by the definition Levi-Strauss offers: “Structuralism is the search for unsuspected harmonies. It is the discovery of a system of relations latent in a series of objects.” More than that, structuralism asserts above all that man’s actions arc lawful; they can be comprehended precisely given enough time and effort and intelligence; they can be described and classified because they make sense, no matter how arbitrary, irrational, impulsive, wanton, inexplicable they seem. 

Certainly Piaget has faith that a substantial part of man’s thinking is constant and describable. More than that, he finds that some psychological events transcend culture, history, everything except their own persistent appearance. That is, ideas held by the ancient Greeks or Chinese depend upon assumptions that modern children can be observed learning for themselves-assumptions about density, space, time and so on. Yes, Piaget sees the environment causing us to change (he calls it “accommodation”) and he also sees us making changes in things as we deal with them (“assimilation”); but his chief concern is with processes that relatively ignore not only social, cultural or economic influences, but even emotional ones. That is, regardless of my endless hang-ups, I developed (from childhood into adolescence, in ways described by Piaget) certain approaches to “life” and its “challenges.” I learned, for instance, that things thrown up fall down, that things of one size contain more (or less) than things of another size. Today I may know such “facts” so well that I don’t stop and think about what I know, or don’t even consider what I know to be “knowledge”; but so it is—as any mother knows who watches her children slowly and sometimes painfully learn answers, ask interminable “why’s,” and go on to “master” the playroom, the backyard, and finally one grade’s work after another in school. (Piaget learned an enormous amount from “simply” watching his three children grow up.) 

Emphasis on the Normal 

Now, what have Piaget’s ideas to do with the recent attention he has been receiving on this side of the Atlantic? If one goes through his new book one finds a good deal of his ideas about intelligence, about the mental development of the child, about the development of thinking and its relationship to language. To some, however, his ideas are a mere foil; they are meant to be used for quite other reasons than Piaget ever had in mind. Like Freud, he is being summoned and used as an ideological spokesman (sometimes against Freud). If I find psychoanalysis too clinical, too preoccupied with the abnormal, too interested in the emotional, the unconscious, the “goings-on” between people-well, I can turn elsewhere. I can turn to Piaget and his emphasis on normal development, on the cognitive, on man the developing thinker rather than man the universal neurotic, on psychological events that take place as the child grows older, rather than as the child gets more and more intricately involved with his mother and his father. And if Freud is not the bothersome one, but rather Sartre, there is the structuralist side of Piaget to hurl against the existentialism that-like psychoanalysis-has after all been around and dominant so long, so very long. (Twenty years is it, or twenty-five?) Never mind that Freud also built his structures, “agencies” he called them, the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego. Never mind that Sartre’s existentialism is in search of the same “harmonies” and “laws” that either Levi-Strauss or Piaget seeks, though in comparison with them the “areas” he chooses to examine and the methods he uses are indeed different—as Freud’s were, as Piaget’s are in contrast to those of Levi-Strauss. 

So, the struggle goes on, as it always has, between logic and emotion, between men like Aquinas and men like Augustine, with all sorts of innocent and not-so-innocent “investigators” (like Freud and Piaget) becoming participants-willingly or against their wills. Systems are hurled against systems, and even within a particular man’s system, ideas are emphasized and others totally ignored-to fit the needs of the person and the historical “time.” We need to simplify even our most complicated ideas; and even the most complicated of our thinkers are not above simple, direct insults and shouting matches in which their own ideas and the ideas of their enemies are given a bare, stark, polemical form-as the contemporary conflicts between Levi-Strauss and Sartre, or the one worked up by various “followers” of Freud and Piaget both illustrate. 

In Piaget’s case one can be sure that he is rather indifferent to such developments-because his passion has been to understand how man gets, finally, the intellectual ability, the knowledge, that enables him to foster those developments: to wage his ideological wars, to formulate laws and conceptualize “existentialist encounters” or “emotional conflicts,” to be Piaget or Freud or whomever, to seek after God, and, alas, to confuse Him with a mirror-image of man or with a given century’s facts and technology. Perhaps Piaget really has escaped the wars that the rest of us cannot escape, even though plenty of people are trying to use him in their various struggles. After all, he can say that he merely wants to know how we came to know-that he is content to let those who do know, who claim to know Something or Somebody, continue their fighting and squabbling and wrangling, “world without end.”