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He was not a psychoanalyst, and most certainly not a Freudian. Piaget espoused precisely the kind of pseudo-scientific 'cognitive' and developmental psychology that is now rigid orthodoxy among the cranks, cooks and crooks who practice psychology in the English-speaking world. This kind of psychology, drag-queen of the social sciences, is the official religion of liberal capitalist societies. It leans heavily into the assumptions of consumer capitalism - the sovereign, rational individual; the natural progression from helpless economic nonentity to healthy, successful participant in the marketplace - while clumsily concealing its ideological commitments and quietly shovelling dissenters out the door marked 'cognitive distortions.' Unlike true psychoanalysis, which is a kind of intrepid exploration of an undiscovered country, mainstream cognitive psychology is a mechanism of individual and social control. Nobody should trust it, least of all perverts. Piaget is not solely to blame for all this, of course, but he laid a lot of the ground for the pipeline delivering children into cognitive-behavioural meatworks. Once you know how children are meant to 'develop,' you are in a position to identify the ones who have got it 'wrong.' There are of course thinkers who dissent from the Piagetian norm, the idea that young humans develop like frogs from frogspawn and you just need to let them go through the larval stage to attain succesful adulthood. I have mentioned critical developmental psychology before, but you expressed a remarkable lack of curiosity as I recall, so I'm reluctant to cast pearls before your grunting snout yet again. If you really are intellectually curious - and I'm not at all sure you are even capable of such a state - you can read Morss' Growing Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology, which proposes that the main problem with Piagetian developmental psychology is that it is "too developmental." |