ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the general influence of biological ideas on the developmental psychology of six major figures in the history of the discipline. These "major" figures are: Granville Stanley Hall, James Mark Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Heinz Werner. Freud was turning to developmental questions during the 1890s, at much the same time as Hall and Baldwin in the USA. Baldwin's understanding of biology and of the Darwinian contribution was far deeper than that of the older man. Recapitulationism became increasingly embedded in Baldwin's larger theory of evolution but always remained central to it. As well as endorsing the "biological" or ancestral form of recapitulation, then, Baldwin also clearly endorses the cultural version. The infant, for Baldwin, is "plainly recapitulating the items in the social history of the race" and thus "the embryology of society is open to study in the nursery."
