ABSTRACT
In the book which allows the reader to reconstruct best what he was like as a father, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, Piaget mentioned his analysis once but in an oblique way, writing that ‘it is remarkable how many visual images come back with childhood memories’. The expert on childhood had a difficult childhood himself. Piaget’s father Arthur was a medieval historian and professor at the Neuchatel Academy. Rebecca, Piaget’s mother, came from a family of wealthy industrialists in Paris but she became a socialist as well as a strict Calvinist. Piaget did more than hint at problems between them. ‘My mother was very intelligent, very energetic and at heart really good but her somewhat neurotic temperament made our family life rather difficult.’ The parallel with Emilie Jung and Melanie Klein’s mother, Libussa, is striking. As a result of his mother’s temperament, Piaget admitted he played much less than children usually did and concentrated on work ‘to imitate my father but also to take refuge in a world that was both personal and not make believe’. Jean Piaget wrote that his father was ‘a man who had a scrupulous and critical mind. He did not like glib generalisations. Among much else he taught me the value of systematic work even when it came to details’. As a boy of eight, Piaget collected catalogues of motorcars which were not make believe, and dreamt ‘of nothing but factories and machines . . . I have always hated any flight from reality, an attitude that stems from the fact that my mother was not stable’. When Piaget was 15, his mother insisted he follow a course of religious instruction. His father did not share his wife’s faith and so, while he obeyed his mother’s wishes, Piaget did the course in a critical spirit. But the question of why his mother was so difficult and the impact it had on the family meant that ‘when I started studying psychology, I focussed my interest on psychoanalysis and pathological psychology’. Eva Schepeler also found the text of a talk Piaget gave to the Alfred Binet Society. (Binet devised some of the first intelligence tests for children.) In his talk, Piaget describes the dream of an anonymous 22-year-old patient – he himself was 22 at the time – who is walking anxiously through a city to find a room after he had ‘secret conflicts with his mother’. His mother was trying to bully him into religion, just like Rebecca was, while he needed to ‘develop himself in a personal direction’ and establish his independence, just like Piaget himself. Schepeler argues there were also sexual undertones to the dream, presumably Oedipal ones, though she did not specify any details. About three years after his lecture to the Alfred Binet Society, Piaget tried to do something which no analyst seems to have ever done. According to Piaget’s sister, Marthe Piaget-Burger, who eventually became an analyst herself, her brother tried to analyse his mother sometime between 1925 and 1929. The differences between this particularly bizarre episode and Freud and Klein’s analyses of their children is one of authority. Piaget might act the analyst but his mother still had power over him. She stopped the analysis because she disagreed with her son’s interpretations of her dreams. (Did Piaget suggest mama had incestuous fantasies or that she wanted
to kill her perhaps dull husband? We shall never know.) What we do know is that ‘Il aurait vivement ressenti cet echec’, as Piaget’s sister said, meaning Piaget would have felt this failure badly. Marthe is the only one of Piaget’s sisters he mentions in his autobiography. Piaget was a child prodigy. When he was ten, he saw an albino sparrow in a park and sent a short article about it to the Rameau de Sapin, Neuchatel’s natural history journal. His article was accepted and ‘I was launched’, Piaget wrote with some irony. After the article appeared, he approached Paul Godet, the director of the local natural history museum, explaining that he was at school and asked if he could study the museum’s collections outside normal working hours. Godet agreed and also invited him to accompany him on expeditions to collect molluscs. ‘These studies, premature as they were, were very useful in my education as a scientist’, Piaget said. He thought watching shellfish insulated him from the lure of philosophy. When Piaget was 16, his godfather, the writer Samuel Cornut, introduced him to Henri Bergson’s work. Piaget found Bergson, who many thought one of the greatest philosophers, disappointing. ‘I was left with the impression of an ingenious construction’ – he could have said confection – that was more frothy than factual. Bergson is mainly remembered today for his theory of comedy (when human beings behave like machines they become laughable) and his theory of vitalism. Vitalism claimed that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living ones because they have some non-physical element, the mysterious élan vital. Piaget was not convinced. ‘I think it was at that moment that I discovered a need in me which only psychology could satisfy’, Piaget said. When he was 16, Piaget was offered a job in Geneva as a specialist in mollusc research; he replied very politely he would adore to accept, but he still had three years of school to finish. He agreed nevertheless to edit a catalogue of all the molluscs in Switzerland, a catalogue which eventually ran to over 300 pages. After leaving school, Piaget studied for two years in Paris where he learned how to interview psychiatric patients. In 1919, he moved to Zurich to attend Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology. Then he went back to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne with Theodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology laboratory. Piaget noticed that mistakes children made on intelligence tests had some pattern to them. Observing how the child’s mind develops would offer great insights, he decided. No one had done this systematically before, he noted correctly. Darwin, after all, had only studied one of his children. Years before he had children of his own, Piaget had learned how to talk to toddlers. From Paris Piaget returned first to the University of Neuchatel and then, in 1925, to the Institute Jean Jacques Rousseau; he began watching children play and talked to them in the ways he had seen psychiatrists talk to patients when they wanted to understand their thoughts and delusions. But there was a key difference. In one of his experiments, Piaget asked children, ‘What makes the wind?’ The children’s answers were certainly not deluded, but they were also not those an adult would give. What was normal for a child was not what was normal for an adult. The following exchange is revealing.
