ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some properties of the model and identified actual and potential applications of the model in contemporary developmental psychology. Dialectics implies a unity of subject and object that transcends attempts to analyze phenomena into isolated, independent entities. Many scientists were concerned with what they saw as an artificial separation of the object of investigation from the investigator, and of science from politics. The growth of developmental psychology has been accompanied by an increasing uneasiness. This discomfort is centered on the limitations of most conceptual frameworks for dealing with change and transformation. Philosophers since Heraclitus have engaged in various forms of dialectics, but it was Hegel who defined the contemporary characterization. Dialectical movement is characterized by a "negation of the negation." Each stage of development is negated by internal contradictions. The movement and change that characterize a dialectical process are entirely congruent with the "active child" emphasis in some views of developmental psychology.
