Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [145]
The shattering experience led to Binet’s resignation from the clinic and his withdrawal from contact with other psychologists. In virtual isolation for about two years, he wrote and produced several plays with themes of terror, murder, and mental illness. Happily, he also spent much time observing the thought processes of his two children, Madeleine and Alice, who were then four and a half and two and a half. To study the nature of thinking at their ages, he devised a number of simple tests: In one he asked them to name the uses of certain everyday objects; in another he asked them to judge which of two piles of coins or beans contained more items; in a third he removed a group of objects from view and then put them back one by one, asking whether any remained unreturned. When the girls were older, he gave them little problems to solve in order to study the growth of reasoning processes. These studies, which he described in three papers, foreshadowed the achievements of Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, and were the first step toward the work that would make Binet famous.
Another step in that direction was his return, at thirty-five, to professional life. In 1892, on a train platform, he happened to meet Henri Beaunis, director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne, and fell into a friendly argument with him about hypnosis. The upshot was that Beaunis invited Binet to become his assistant, and two years later, on Beaunis’s retirement, Binet succeeded him as director. At the laboratory he conducted his own research studies, directed those of many students, and at thirty-seven belatedly earned a doctorate. The degree was in natural science, not psychology, but by this time, thanks to his position and publications, he was a recognized figure in French psychology; and, what with his twirled, pointed mustache, pince-nez, and hair swirled artfully across his forehead in the mode of the god Pan, he looked the part. But his dearest wish, to become a professor of psychology, never came true; to members of the establishment, his notorious work on hypnotism, his unorthodox education, and his wrong kind of doctorate stood against him.
Besides, there was his latest bizarre enthusiasm: an effort to prove that intelligence was directly linked to brain size and could be gauged through “craniometry” (skull measurement). He had read and been convinced by Paul Broca’s (and possibly also by Galton’s) views to this effect. Binet reviewed previous craniometric studies, made a number of skull measurements on his own, and between 1898 and 1901 published nine papers on the subject in L’Année Psychologique, a journal that he had founded and of which he was the editor.
Once again he had taken a wrong trail. Early in the series he had said it was “incontestable” that head size was correlated with intelligence,25but later he measured the skulls of a number of schoolchildren identified by their teachers as the most intelligent in their classes and others as the least intelligent, and found that the differences in head size were insignificant. After much remeasuring and reconsideration of his data, he concluded that there were indeed regular but quite small differences in head size, but only between the five brightest and five dullest students in each group. He abandoned craniometry as an approach to the measurement of intelligence.
One could hardly have guessed, at this point, that Binet, in middle age, would shortly produce a work of solid scholarship