Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [230]
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Piaget, unlike Freud, was not an outsider who had to claw his way to acceptance; unlike Pavlov, he lived through no period of economic hardship; unlike James, he suffered no breakdown; unlike Wertheimer, he experienced no epiphany. The one singular feature of his relatively uneventful formative years was that he had virtually no childhood—which may be why he spent so much of his adult life with children. His father was a meticulous and critical professor of history, his mother neurotic and, unlike her husband, exceedingly pious. The discrepancies resulted in a troubled family life, to which little Jean made a bizarre adaptation:
I started to forgo playing for serious work very early; this I obviously did as much to imitate my father as to take refuge in both a private and a non-fictitious world. Indeed, I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.
No fairy tales, adventure stories, or games for this sober child; by seven he was devoting his free time to studying birds, fossils, sea shells, and internal-combustion mechanics, and before ten he wrote a book on birds of the region.
But his pride in the book evaporated when his father regarded it as a mere compilation. At ten, Piaget “decided to be more serious.” Having seen a partly albino sparrow in the park, he wrote a brief scientific report about it and sent it to a natural history journal in Neuchâtel, whose editor, unaware that the author was a boy, published it. This success emboldened Piaget to write to the director of the Neuchâtel natural history museum, asking whether he could study their collection after hours; the director went him one better by inviting him to assist in classifying and labeling his shell collection. Piaget did so twice a week for four years, learning enough to begin publishing scientific articles on mollusks in zoology journals before he was sixteen.
About that time, he spent a long vacation with his godfather, a literary man who considered the youth’s interests too narrow and introduced him to philosophy. A larger world opened up before Piaget. He was fascinated by the subject, particularly the problem of epistemology, and by the end of the vacation decided “to consecrate my life to the biological explanation of knowledge.” He still considered himself, however, a natural scientist, not a psychologist, and at the University of Neuchâtel went through undergraduate studies and on to a doctorate, which he received at twenty-two, in the natural sciences.
Only then did he turn to his real interest. He worked briefly in two psychological laboratories in Zürich, went to Paris and took some courses at the Sorbonne, and was recommended to Théodore Simon (Binet’s collaborator), who put him to work standardizing certain tests of reasoning on five- to eight-year-old Parisian children. For two years Piaget did that—and much more. What interested him was not just determining the age at which children could give the right answer to each reasoning problem, but why, at earlier ages, they all made similar mistakes. He engaged the children in conversations, asking them questions about the world around them, listening carefully to their explanations, and inviting them to solve little puzzles of his own invention, all of which became the core of his lifelong method of investigation. In his autobiography he jubilantly says, “At last I had found my field of research.”
At that point, his goal for the next five years—it turned out to be closer to sixty—was to discover “a sort of embryology of intelligence.” Piaget meant it metaphorically; he did not attribute the growth of intelligence to the maturation of the