Child Development Brawl: Piaget vs. Vygotsky (South East European University, SEEU)

So let's start with Vygotsky.

Vygotsky was Soviet, so I need to drink some vodka. Ah, Pusti Yedda... Sorry. When you drink vodka, no. Okay.

There is one point of agreement between Vygotsky and Piaget, and that is that there is a process of construction.

The child constructs its knowledge, its realization of the world, its acquaintance with the world, and gradually the child builds itself until it becomes an adolescent and an adult.

So there there is an agreement.

And there starts also the disagreement.

Because as I said, Vygotsky says that a child construct itself through society and social institutions, such as the education system.

While Piaget says, and culture, and culture, that's Vygotsky.

While Piaget says, not true.

Even if we take a child and isolate it and put it in the toilets of the university, for example, it will evolve the same way.

The evolution of the child is inexorable. It comes from inside and it cannot be stopped and it does not depend on anything. It doesn't depend on context, on society, on culture, nothing. It's just self-evolving.

Now, this is very reminiscent of earlier debates in psychology.

For example, the debate between Freud and Jung and later psychologists in the schools of object relations and in the school of Jacques Lacan.

Freud and Jung said, the individual matters. And what happens to the individual, happens in the mind of the individual, and the individual cannot help it.

It's automatic process, the reactions are automatic, the input, triggers the same reactions in all human beings, and it just happens. It just happens.

Jung, as I say, Young disagreed with Freud on many issues, but they both agreed that the unit to be studied, the unit we should study, is the individual, because everything happens inside the individual.

And whatever happens to the individual is built in. It's like you could say biological or genetic. Indeed, Freud said that it's biological. He said the foundation is biological.

So this is one approach.

The approach of the object relations schools, especially in the 1960s in the United Kingdom, and of Jacques Lacan, who was a French psychoanalyst, and by the way, looks like my identical twin. It looks exactly like me. So, I'm not kidding. Go online, you will see.

So the approach of these people was exactly the opposite.

Whatever happens to the individual is the outcome of relationships with other people.

Lacan said the unconscious is just the collection of voices of other people. The language, he said. It's aof voices of other people.

Object Relations School said, the self, the self is an outcome of relationships and interactions with other people starting with the mother.

So there were these two schools, the school of Freud and Jung and others that said no, the individual happens, it doesn't matter, the context society, parents, education, none of this matters. And the other school, which said individuals are the outcome of relationships and interactions, and you could use a Venn diagram, you could use a Venn diagram to explicate this.

So, this is the self. This is person number one and person number two. Yes? You're exposed to these two people. You're exposed to them. And where they overlap, this is yourself that is emerging.

So this is the object-relation approach.

So you can see that the debate between Vygotsky and Piaget has long, long roots in psychology, and it has not been resolved to this very day.

Vigotsky said, cognitive development is about learning to use social tools. Learning to use social tools.

What kind of social tools?

Well, language, mathematics, technology, memory.

Vigotsky regarded memory not as a psychological process, but as a learned process. He says, we are learning to remember. We develop strategies to remember.

This is not something that we are born with or come up with, but we acquire it, the same we acquire mathematics.

So this he called social tools.

How does the individual acquire these social tools?

The individual is exposed to skilled people, people with skills. Someone who knows mathematics teaches you mathematics. Someone who speaks a language teaches you the language.

So you need to be exposed to skilled adults and skilled peers. People your age who mustered some skill that you haven't and you acquire it from them. You always acquire skills from other people who possess the skill.

So this is the way you acquire social tools.

What happens if you are not exposed to such people?

You don't acquire these tools and you don't grow up.

And he came up with the concept of cognitive proximal development, or zone of proximate development.

The zone of proximate development is amenable to graphic presentation.

So this is the zone of proximal development. This is the upper zone. This is the lower zone. This is the middle zone. Obviously.

So the zone is divided into skills that you already possess and skills that you cannot acquire without the help of other people.

And this is the zone.

And here are the skills that you mastered. They're also known as the fruits, development fruits. Fruits, like grapefruit, apple.

So these are the skills that you have mastered as a child. This is all about children. These are the skills that you have mastered.

This is the lower limit. These are the fruits.

And these are the skills that you will never master if you are not exposed to an adult or a peer who can teach you, a teacher.

So this is the upper limit, it's also known as the buds, buds, okay, BUD, the buds.

And so you transition from here to here, from the lower limit to the upper limit, you transition via the education system, via society, via exposure to parental figures, via listening to boring old teachers.

This is how you transition from upper limit to, from lower limit to upper limit.

He used a metaphor. He said we transition from fruits to buds and flowers.

That was Vygotsky's metaphor, not mine.

Now, of course, this should remind you immediately, and if it doesn't remind you immediately, pretend that it reminds you immediately.

This should remind you immediately of social learning theory or social cognitive theory. Bandura's work. Bandura means tomato in many languages, but don't hold it against him. He was very clever.

So Bandura's work in social learning or social cognitive theory, he said that we imitate. We learn by imitating. We have role models, and these models model for us.

And through the process of modeling, we learn.

And this is very, very, very similar to Vigotsky's ideas. That's what Vigotsky says.

We acquire social tools and skills by learning, by being educated.

The only difference between Bandura and Vygotsky, except the gap in time, is that Bandura believed that the learning is done via imitation, while Vygotsky believed that the learning is done via learning, via education. These kind of lectures, for example.

So this is the difference between them, but otherwise the theories are identical actually, and Vygotsky preceded Bandura by almost 40 or 50 years.

So here's my advice. If you want to be a psychologist, do not be a Soviet psychologist, because no one will hear about your work. It's a free advice by the way.

Okay. Children transition from lower zone or lower limit of the zone to the upper limit of the zone. They transition from skills that they already possess to skills that they are learning from teachers, education.

But what is the speed of this transition?

We know that some children transition very fast. They learn skills very fast. And some children are a bit slower and they become professors of psychology later in life.

So what makes the difference? What determines the speed with which you traverse the zone of proximal development? What determines the speed?

Vigotsky said several things determine the speed.

Number one, emotional regulation. If you're emotionally dysregulated, if you are all over the place emotionally, if your emotions overwhelm you, whenever you feel an emotion, you get paralyzed. You're debilitated by emotion. You're not likely to learn well. You're not likely to be educated well, and your chances of transitioning to the upper limit are limited.

The second thing is secure attachment.

Vygotsky said that you need to be attached initially to the mother in a proper way. You need to feel secure with the mother. The mother needs to be what is known as a secure base.

And if the mother is not a secure base, if she is what we call a dead mother, metaphorically dead. Andre Green coined this phrase.

A dead mother, for example, a mother who is depressed, a mother who is emotionally absent, a mother who is selfish, a mother who neglects a child, mother ignores the child, abuses the child, traumatizes the child, uses the child. All these kinds of bad mothers, not good enough mothers, they don't create secure attachment. They create insecure attachment.

And Vygotsky said that in this case learning will be hampered, obstructed, and the transition from lower limit to upper limit will be much slower or stop altogether.

Vigotsky's work in this sense is amazing, amazing for you to understand. Vygotsky's work in this sense is amazing. Amazing. For you to understand, Vygotsky wrote these things in the 30s.

Attachment theory, which was created by John Bowlby, was in the 1960s. And Mary Ainsworth, who is the mother, the modern mother of attachment theory, did her work in the late 70s and early 80s, 50 years after Vigotsky.

And yet Vigotsky clearly speaks about attachment, attachment to a mother figure, dead mother, secure base. All these concepts existed in Vygotsky's work 50 years before they were discovered in the West, 30 to 50 years, before they were discovered in the West, which is pretty amazing. The guy was a genius in many ways.

Today, the reason we use Vygotsky's work in universities and schools all over the West is because the dominant theory in psychology, developmental theory, is known as attachment theory. That's a dominant theory, Bowlby, Ainsworth and others.

So we adopted actually Vygotsky's ideas and insights. We agree today in the West, in Western psychology. We agree. We think if a child is exposed to bad parenting, adversity, bad mother, etc., this kind of child will learn much more slowly, and many, many studies have proven this.

Children, for example, who are abused are very slow learners.

The first thing that happens to an abused child is the grades in school deteriorate. It's a first indicator that a child is being abused or there's some adversity in the family.

So Vygotsky was very right about all this.

Vygotsky said that what happens is the parent or the teacher later, the parent interacts with the child in a highly specific way. The parent changes the level of support according with the child's increasing competence. The more the child is competent, the more the child is able to exercise the skill, the less supportive the parent is.

So the good parent allows the child to exercise his new or her new skills. The child learns new skills and the parent doesn't stop the child from using the skills, but on the contrary, the parent withdraws, the parent walks away, the parent allows the child to be alone, make mistakes, absolutely, mistakes are very crucial to learning, and so on.

So this is called scaffolding, scaffolding. It's a concept of scaffolding.

Now, of course, this is at the core of the Western education system.

Because what happens is you study, study, study, you get a degree. A degree is a certificate of competence. A degree says, you have learned, you are competent. Now you can be on your own because you have a degree. You got a degree as a psychologist. You can work as a psychologist.

The professor doesn't follow you throughout life. The professor drops you. It says, okay, you're competent. I'm walking away. Now do your own thing. Make your own mistakes. learn, experiment, try, get better, improve, and so on. So this is scaffolding.

The scaffolding is a crucial insight in modern education.

You think, so what? This makes sense. If the teacher teaches me something, now I know as much as the teacher. I don't need the teacher anymore.

It does make sense after Vygotsky.

Actually, before Vygotsky, that was not the approach at all.

Before Vygotsky, there was no situation, I mean, before, let's say, modern education. The approach wasn't that the person learned something and now they were independent. There was not such thing.

You were an apprentice, you learned something, you learned a skill, and then you belong to a guild, a guild, a collective of the same profession. A guild of painters, a guild of construction workers, a guild. And the guild monitored you and regulated you and instructed you how to work, and where to work, and how much to charge.

So the guild replaced the teacher. You were never independent. Until the more or less 18th century, you were never ever independent. Never mind how much you learned, how good you were, you were never independent.

Vygotsky suggested that we should let the child go. Once the child has learned something, we should let it go. We should vanish.

And this is called scaffolding. You cannot imagine how revolutionary this idea is.

Because today you live in a Vygotsky environment. So for you, it's normal, but cannot imagine. Someone from the 17th century would be shocked with this idea. You would say, what? I'm all alone. I'm all independent. They would go into apoplexia. They wouldn't know what to do.

So next, Vygotsky dealt with the, and we're going to come to Piaget as well later, but next Vygotsky, I'll give you a break, I promise. If you're nice.

We have to pretend that you're interested in the lecture and I'll give you a break.

We are at my first. That's the way. That's the way.

Vygotsky also dealt with a question of language. He was very focused on the issue of speech.

Now, Piaget did the same. Piaget was also interested in language and speech, but in an entirely different way.

We'll come to it.

Vigotsky said that speech, Vigotsky actually had two versions. He contradicted himself in his later work.

Initially, Vygotsky said the child communicates with other people, then the child talks to itself, and by talking to itself, the child exercises speech, and then he's able to communicate with other people on a much higher level.

So like basic communication with people, mommy give me food, mommy food, so basic communication with people, then self-talk, this is called self-talk, so the child talks to itself.

And we see children, indeed, you know, talking to themselves and so on. A child would say, oh, I have to do it this way.

Sometimes the child internalizes, for example, the mother, and the child shouts at itself. The child says, you're a bad, why did you do that? You're a bad girl or a bad boy.

And by the way, many adults are the same. They have an internalized voice, for example, of a parental figure.

And when they make a mistake or something, they criticize themselves, aloud. They say, oh, Lydia, what did you do now? You know, this kind of thing.

Sorry, oh, Sam, what did you do now? You know, this kind of thing.

Oh, Sam, what did you do now?

Because Lydia never makes mistakes. I'm sorry, it was a mistake to suggest that she makes mistakes.

The Udry is always right.

Lydia is always right, yeah, naturally.

Lydia over all of it. So, naturally. Lydia, about all of all of it.

So, there was the first version, and he said, therefore, that speech evolves in a way that allows the child to socially communicate and by talking to itself to solve tasks or to find solutions and he called it behavioral regulation.

He said when the child talks to itself, the child modifies its own behavior. The child, for example, makes a mistake. The child criticizes itself, and then learns to not make this mistake.

So it's all a form of self-education or self-regulation. And this became known as private speech.

So that was the first version of Vygotsky. He said we have external speech, then we have self-talk, then we have private speech.

Now, that is very interesting.

Again, Vygotsky preceded Western psychology by about 30 years.

About 30 years.

In Western psychology in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a woman by the name of Melanie Klein.

By the way, you should know that seven of the ten most important psychologists in history were not psychologists. They had no education in psychology, no training in psychology, no degree in psychology whatsoever. That's a fact.

Melanie Klein was one of them, Donald Winnicott, Sigmund Freud. None of them was a psychologist.

And many others, by the way.

So Melanie Klein in the 50s came up with the idea of many ideas. She came up with many ideas.

But she came up with a critical idea of introjection.

She said that when we interact with someone who is very important to us, someone who is significant, someone who is meaningful, like for example a mother, or later in life, a father, or a teacher, influential peer, role model, even on television. You know, when you interact with such people, we create an internal representation of this person in our minds. We internalize the person.

Now, I will not go into the theory of all this, why we internalize and so on. There's a whole theory about this.

But suffice it to say that she said that we internal it.

From that moment on, the voice of that person is here, is inside the mind. And this voice is known as the introject.

So we have an introject of the person. You have a mother, you listen to her, she's a good mother, she's a bad mother, whatever, and you have her voice in your mind forever, like until you die, probably after or so. So this is the introject of the mother.

Now, introjection is in psychoanalytic theory, in object relations theory, it's a concept that underlies most of psychology until the late 80s.

And she said, and then many others said, the interjects inform the person. The interjects plan, make plans, guide behavior, monitor behavior, and modify behavior.

So, interjects are very influential in behavioral regulation, in behavioral modification.

And that is, of course, exactly what Vigotsky said.

30 years before Melanie Klein, Vigotsky said that there is private speech. The private speech is a voice, or voices that the child uses to talk to itself.

Of course, where do these voices come from? They are mother's voice, father's voice.

So he stumbled upon the concept of introject, an interjection long before Melanie Klein, about 30 years. He was a genius. Vygotsky was an absolute genius.

I mean, he did most of his work at your age, in his late teens and early 20s. Quite a genius.

And so there is this issue of private speech.

Now this immediately provokes other considerations, other fields.

So for example, the issue of private speech we know in child development and later on in life, we have interjection, which I mentioned, Melanie Klein.

But the issue of private speech is very critical, for example, in psychosis, when we study psychotic disorders.

Because what happens with psychosis? You have an internal voice as a psychotic. You have an internal voice, and you make a mistake. It's a mistake known as misattribution.

You make a mistake, you believe that this internal voice is external.

So you have a voice inside your mind and you say, God is talking to me or my dead wife is talking to me.

So you project the internal voice outward and it comes back to you as if it is coming from the outside.

So it's a form of private speech in effect because no one talks, no one is talking to you. There's no one there talking to you, not God, not your dead wife, whatever. No one is talking to you.

But you still maintain a dialogue.

This is an example of self-talk.

Exactly like the child talks to itself, you shouldn't have done it. Oh, which piece should I put? You can hear children speak aloud. It's an absolute fact. I mean, follow children. You will hear them talking aloud.

The psychotic does the same. It's private speech. He is maintaining a dialogue with himself by projecting his internal voices outward.

This phenomenon is known as hyper-reflexivity. It's when the psychotic person expands, like Big Bang, expands outwards and consumes the whole of reality.

So it's the ego, if you wish, the self of the psychotic person is expansive. It goes out and consumed. And then anything that's happening in your mind is happening in reality.

Because you are reality. You consumed reality. You digested it. It became part of you.

And this is known as hyper-reflexivity.

We could therefore say that hyper-reflexivity is a pathological case of self-talk and private speech. Pathologized self-talk and private speech, which also leads us to the conclusion that people with psychotic disorders are stuck somehow in childhood.

It's a case of arrested development. We no longer use the phrase, arrested development, by the way. But it's a case of arrested development.

It's like they have not developed beyond the self-talk private speech phase, which is age 4 to 7, by the way.

So they haven't evolved.

And we see it, for example, in pseudo-psychotic disorders, disorders that mimic psychosis, but they are not psychosisFor example, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. These are pseudo-psychotic conditions. They have many, many psychotic elements.

And so in these conditions, there is also private speech.

For example, the narcissist, someone with narcissistic personality disorder, the narcissist confuses internal objects with external objects, vice versa. The narcissist confuses external with internal.

When the narcissist sees you, the narcissist regards you not as an external object, something outside, something separate from him, something external to him. No, the narcissist regards you automatically as an internal object. He internalizes you, he interjects you immediately.

And this is a psychotic feature, because what is psychosis? Confusion between internal and external.

So it's kind of psychosis.

Same with borderline personality disorder.

In borderline personality disorder, the borderline internalizes her intimate partner. But in borderline, it's limited to intimate romantic relationships. She internalizes the intimate partner, and then she uses the intimate partner to regulate her moods, her emotions.

The intimate partner has the power to change the mood of the borderline like that, with a single word. And the intimate partner has the ability to trigger the emotions of the borderline or to assuage them, to reduce them.

The intimate partner of the borderline is anxiolytic. There's a capacity to reduce anxiety. So there's a lot of power.

We call this external regulation.

Again, there is a confusion in the borderline's mind between internal object and external object. These are all therefore pseudo-psychotic conditions.

And they all involve a dialogue with a voice, with an internal voice. The intimate partner's internal voice, the external objects, internal voice. All of these are internal voices.

And all of this was first described by Vigotsky, now we know. We thought that Melanie Klein described it. But actually it was Vigotsky, now we know. We thought that Melanie Klein described it. But actually it was Vigotsky who came up with this.

So Vigotsky came up with private speech.

Now, there have been two Jews who were philosophers. I'm laughing because the Jews are all over the place. I'm a Jew, by the way, so I'm entitled to be anti-Semitic.

So there were two philosophers, Jewish, by the way, and they had a huge debate on language.

One of these philosophers, his name was Wittgenstein and the other one was Kripke.

So I'm teaching you not only psychology but I'm introducing you to a little philosophy in a little bit more to show you that psychology is not divorced from other disciplines.

Wittgenstein and Kripke had a debate about language.

I'll summarize it for you, although it's possibly the most complex debate in philosophy. But Wittgenstein said, a language is not a language unless it is used in public, and unless it points, it pictures the world. It points at the world. He called it picturing the world.

So a language has to picture the world and a language has to be used with other people. A language must always be public. He said there's no such thing as private language.

Kripke disagreed. And so does Sam Vaknin.

Kripke disagreed, he said that definitely there are such things as private languages. Each individual is capable of developing a language that will not be accessible to other people and has nothing to do with the external world.

It has to do with the internal world and it can be so individualistic, so idiosyncratic, so obscure that no external observer could ever make sense of it. It's not encoded language, it's not a code because a code in principle can be broken. But it's something that is not even coded. It's totally unique to that individual.

So this was the debate between Williamson and Kripke.

And of course, Vigotsky, again long before Kripke, Vigotsky agreed with Kripke, long before Kripke, and said that, yes, of course, there is such a thing as private speech.

So did Piaget, by the way. Piaget agreed that there is private speech, but Piaget said that private speech, and we will come to it a bit later, Piaget said private speech is immature and it's egocentric. If you have private speech, you're immature and you're egocentric.

And he said the most prominent example of private speech that is immature and egocentric is the private speech of adolescence. He said, adolescents have a private speech. And so that is because they are immature and so.

This is reminiscent of the work of Elkind, which I mentioned in the previous lecture.

Elkind suggested that adolescents have what he called personal fable, a narrative, a story, in which they are the heroes, they are the protagonists.

And so this is a little like private speech, a little, because the personal fable is unconscious. It's not something you... So it's a bit like private speech.

And he said that the adolescent has an imaginary audience. The adolescents are always acting as if he is on a stage and the whole world is watching.

And that's also very reminiscent of psychosis and of a private speech because an imaginary audience involves the incorporation of the world in your mind. It's imaginary, yes? So the world in your mind. It's imaginary, yes? So it's in your mind. The audience is inside your mind.

This is exactly what psychotics do. And even more precisely, that's exactly what narcissists do.

So we could safely say that adolescents are narcissists. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a healthy stage of narcissism, but they're narcissists.

And again, we see the connections between psychosis, narcissism, adolescence, private speech, language, and so on and so forth.

On this issue, I think Wittgenstein was massively wrong, in my view. I mean, surprising because he was definitely one of the brightest brains in human history, not only in the 20th century. But on this issue, I think he was very wrong.

What about thought? What about, yes, in a minute, in five minutes. What about thought?

What about cognition? The process of thinking. Can we think without language?

That was an interesting question. That was a question that motivated the community of psychologists and philosophers. And scientists, later, scientists like Noam Chomsky.

So there was a question of, can you think without words? Can you think without language? Is cognition dependent on language? Is it a derivative of language? Do they go together? Do they preced each other? And so on and so forth.

And the answer of Vygotsky was that language and cognition developed separately, and then they merge.

In other words, Vygotsky believed in what we call pre-verbal cognition, the ability to think without words.

Now, Vygotsky was not alone in this. Again, 40 years after Vygotsky, he was a pioneer, an amazing pioneer, an incredible mind.

About 40 years after Vygotsky, there was, for example, a famous psychoanalyst by the name of Bollas. And Bollas said that we have thoughts, thoughts, that are unknown to us. He called it the unknown thought.

And so these thoughts are unknown to us in the sense that we cannot verbalize them. They're there, but we cannot convert them into words.

And so that's an example of Vygotsky's approach that says that, yeah, you could have pre-verbal cognition, and then you acquire language, and then you couple it with the cognition, and then the cognition becomes verbal.

So that's his approach.

Okay, let's summarize the language part of Vygotsky.

He says that language starts off as communication with others and also is used for introspection, looking inward and self-talk.

He says that the evolution of language is between the ages of three or four to seven.

He said that it starts with external speech, where we communicate with others in order to obtain goals. The goals are very specific and small and stupid, or not so stupid, like give me food or give me the candy or whatever.

And then it evolves.

Actually, the evolution is withdrawal from the world.

The evolution is not more external speech, but not external speech.

So the child first communicates externally, then withdraws in words, self-talks. He develops self-talk.

And this is what in Vygotsky's work is known as cognitive or inner, or internal or later private speech.

So this is the second phase.

And then private speech allows the child to monitor its behavior, regulate the behavior, modify the behavior, etc. This rising self-awareness, because this is how the self is formed, basically.

Lacan says that the self is the outcome of language, the use of language. Language is very critical.

So that's how the self is formed, and then the child feels that it can interact with others.

So again, there is external speech. The child becomes socially competent.

And there is the final transition to external speech, which we are all using here. We are using external speech.

This is reminiscent of psychoanalytic theories, including object relations theories, where there is a transition from what is known as narcissistic object to other objects.

So, narcissistic object is focused inwards, the child is focused on itself, the child is the source of its own gratification, and the child talks to itself. This is all narcissistic, self-directed.

And then when the child grows up, the child transitions towards interactions with other people.

So there is narcissistic libido, which is narcissistic energy, when it transitions to other libido or other directed libido. Libido that is energy that is directed at other people.

This is very similar to Vygotsky, actually. It's exactly what Vygotsky says.

We first go inwards. We develop self-speech or self-talk, and only then we go outwards.

So there's an agreement there between Vygotsky and Freud, but not an agreement with Piaget, as we shall see a bit later.

Let's talk about the differences between Piaget and Vygotsky before we come to one area of agreement between the two of them, shockingly, and then to Piersh's work.

Piaget said that children need support, but they need support in order to explore the world and discover the world on their own terms, at their own rhythm and tempo, in their own way, and according to their interests, not to the adult interest, not to the teacher's interest and so on.

So the child is in charge. The child acquires knowledge.

Piaget believed that the child acquires knowledge according to some kind of internal scheme, internal plan or program. Today we would call it internal coding that unfolds as the child grows up.

And that this process of becoming, this process of unfolding, is not something that should be disrupted or intervened with by others, including parents, including teachers. It's not good, not okay.

So this is Piaget.

Vygotsky equally believed the children need support, but they need support and opportunities to learn with skilled adults usually.

So Vygotsky was more authoritarian. There should be a father figure or mother figure or teacher figure, someone in charge. Someone should be in charge. And that someone in charge should dictate to the child what skills to learn what subject to encompass and how to develop how to evolve what Piaget said no the child is in charge.

But the differences between them are not only superficial. The differences are massive.

For example, Piaget believed that the main driving force of human development or child development and adolescent development is cognition.

While Vygotsky believed the main driving force is society, not cognition.

Piaget believed that the development cannot be stopped. The child will develop. Never mind the environment, never mind the society, never mind the culture, never mind the education of the system, never mind which adults are around the child. Never mind all that, the child goes through the same stages. End of story. It's like an automaton, kind of robot.

While Vygotsky said, no, there is any development that occurs with the child, first of all, is not in stages. They're not stages. But any development that occurs with a child, first of all, is not in stages. They're not stages. But any development is dictated by the adults, by the skilled people, sometimes not adults, sometimes peers, but by the skilled people outside the individual. They shape the individual, they mold. They form the individual.

You know what is putty? Putty, this substance that you can play with and make all kinds of shapes. So the child is putty.

Plastilina, yeah.

So this child is putty in the hands of their skilled adults and skilled peers and so on so forth.

Consequently, of course, Piaget said that language is not very important, that education is not very important.

What matters is cognition. What matters is the biological template. What matters is the programming, but not anything external.

And he perceived, Piaget perceived language as external, something external, coming from the outside. The cognitive skills emerge.

So, Piaget's approach is known as emergentism. The things emerge, while Wigotsky's approach is from the outside.

So, socio-cognitive, social cognitive versus emergent.

Children said, Piaget should explore. They should never be instructed. So Piaget did not believe in instruction. Piaget actually was anti-education.

By the way, Pi was a kind of proto-hippy. He was wearing a bea, you know, all the time was wearing a bea and riding a bicycle. Even when he was like 80, he was with a bele and riding a bicycle. It was famous with it.

So he was kind of, he, rebellion, he was a rebel. He was anti-establishment. He was kind of hippie, he was a very interesting character.

Individualism to Piaget mattered a lot, and he said the individual should pilot itself. It should not have co-pilot.

So he was dead set, actually, against...

Okay, there was one field where Piaget and Vygotsky agreed, which I believe is why Vygotsky died. It worried him a lot.

But there was one field that they agreed, and that was morality.

Morality. The development of morality in children and adolescent, according to both Vigotsky and Piaget, is socially determined.

In other words, morality has to do with society. Piaget agrees with that.

Piaget distinguishes between three stages of the development of morality, and that is the heteronomous stage, heteronomous morality, transitional morality, and autonomous morality.

So, heteronomous morality is rules are fixed. They're not human. Rules come from somewhere. They're given in a way. They're fixed. They're not human. Justice is immediate. It's called imminent justice. Justice is immediate.

So you know when a kid does something bad, kid, they look around like, where's the punishment going to come from? They're doing this. This is imminent justice. It's the belief that rules have nothing to do with humans. They're kind of divine. They're kind of in nature. And if you do something wrong, the universe will punish you. So it's punishment is inevitable and immediate. And there's nothing to do about it.

In heteronomous morality, there's no perception of intention. It doesn't matter what you intended to do. What matters are the consequences of your actions.

So even if your intentions were good, but the consequences are bad, you should be punished.

So for example, a child, when we ask children in studies, we ask them, there is one person and he was a nice person, he was a good person, etc., but he broke 10 glasses. And there is another person, and he was a bad person, and he wanted to break the glass, and he broke one glass. Who should receive more punishment? And the children would say the guy who broke 10 glasses.

Because the intentions don't matter. The consequences matter. This is heteronomous justice.

And then there's a phase, and that is common in children between the ages of 4 and 7. It's very rare for someone age seven and above to still believe in heteronymous justice.

Actually, there were studies, we'll discuss them later, that proved that, or demonstrated that even children aged three already have autonomous justice. They transition to the mature form of justice.

Transitional morality is between heteronymous and autonomous, and then there is autonomous morality.

Autonomous morality is 10 years and older. You have autonomous morality, I hope.

And autonomous morality says that rules and laws are created by human beings. And so they are not fixed. They can be negotiated. They can be compromised. They can even be defied. You have the right to say this law is not okay. I'm not going to obey this law.

So this is autonomous justice. That's why it's autonomous. Autonomous justice.

And intentions are much more important than consequences. So if you have intention to do evil and you failed, you are still evil and you still should be punished.

And that's why we have, for example, attempted murder in the law, yeah? Attempted. Nothing happened. The guy is alive. But you still go to prison because you attempted.

In the law we have the concept of mens rea. Mens rea, in Corpus reus. Mens rea means the intention to commit a crime.

And in most legal systems in the world, to go to prison, the prosecution needs to prove mens rea. The prosecution needs to prove intent.

So the three elements are intent, motivation, opportunity. There's the three you go to prison.

So this is autonomous morality, and both Piaget and Vygotsky agreed that morality emerges as the result of social interactions. Give and take. Fair play. It's fair. It's not fair.

When you talk to children at 7, 8, they're very big on fairness. They will tell you it's not fair. What you're doing to me is not fair. They use fair like a weapon. It's not fair. They use fair like a weapon. It's not fair. They weaponize morality.

So question of fairness, interactions with peers.

And so all this gives rise to autonomous morality.

Where actually the locus of the morality, where the morality sits, is the individual, not society, not the justice system, not the teachers, not the parents, but the individual begins to say, I know what's right. I know what's right.

Now, in the formation of morality, there is the issue of conscience.

In psychoanalytic theory, in psychodynamic theories, and in object relations theory, in short, until the 1980s, conscience was, you remember, introjects, the voices that you absorb from the outside, mother's voice, father's voice, so all these voices are inside your mind.

Some of these voices carry the messages of society. These voices are known as socialization agents. They carry the rules and regulations and scripts, behavior scripts, how to behave from society to the individual.

These voices are here. These voices create like a coalition, a coalition of introjects. And this coalition is your conscience, this cluster of introjects. That's your conscience. That's the voice that tells you what you're doing right now is wrong. You should not be in this class. You should be out playing because it's sunny.

I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. Okay? So wrong and right. These are introjects. Both introjects are actually the internalization of society. It's all social.

And that's the only point of agreement between Piaget and Vygotsky.

Long, long, long before Piaget and a little long before Vygotsky, there was a guy called Arnold Gesell. Arnold Gesell is the father and the father and the mother and the grandfather and the grandmother of human development theory. He came up with the concept. Actually, I think he coined the phrase human development. He did most of his work in the 1910s and 1920s. And he was the first to suggest that human development goes through stages.

His ideas were very interesting because he said that people don't transition from one stage to the next in a linear way, but that they go forward and very often they go backward. And so they go forward and backward and sometimes forward and forward and sometimes forward, forward, forward and backward. I mean, it's all the time up and down a kind of spiral.

So, Gesell created a spiral theory of human development. Gesell's influence was huge on Vygotsky, on Piaget, on all of them are the intellectual children of Gesell.

So if you really want to go into this field sometime in the future, you should begin by studying Gesell.

The teacher of Gesell was a guy called Stanley Hall. And Stanley Hall came with the first to come with the concept of adolescence.

Before Stanley Hall, there was no such stage. People were talking about children, adults. It was no adolescents. And before that, there was no childhood also. People were talking about small adults and big adults. As simple as that, small men, small women, and big adults.

So as you see, our understanding of the phases of human development is evolving.

Some scholars say that we are actually going backwards, that we're inventing nonsensical constructs that have no ground in reality.

For example, adolescence is becoming such an elastic concept, you know? Now you're adolescent until you're 25, or 29 even, in some theories. In some theories, you're adolescent and you're 29.

So when you stretch a concept so much, elastic concept, it at some point loses its meaning. It's become big meaningless.

So we're doing this a lot. We are doing this also to childhood and also to adulthood.

For example, what is adulthood? The previous lesson. What is adulthood?

We are beginning to see that all these stages are a bit artificial and perhaps not grounded in any reality.

Childhood is a special case because the brain really is underdeveloped and children really, at least up to age four, let's say, children are really, really different. They cannot reason.

For example, a child cannot evaluate the chances that it would be run over by a car. It's a famous study that children cannot evaluate this, simply.

So, while after that age six, seven, children can begin to evaluate this.

So clearly, let's say up to age four, some people say up to age six or seven, these are known as the formative years, formative years, clearly this is another species. It's not like small adolescent or small adults. It's really something extremely different.

Ironically, childhood that did not exist as a concept, most of human history, I think, will be the only one to survive. I think adolescents will be forgotten as a phase shortly. Adulthood definitely is dead. Just go to America and have a look at something. It's a dead idea.

And all that's left is the biological fact that until age four, five, six, you are very different. You are not like adults.

So I think only childhood actually would survive. Or to be even more precise, not childhood, but infancy. Infancy will survive. It's the only biologically viable category of human development, in my view.

Vygotsky and Piaget studied infancy, essentially, and that's why they survived. Survives.

Okay, so let's begin to talk about John Piaget, who, remember, was influenced by Arnold Jessel.

Like everything Swiss, Jean Piaget divided human development to four stages.

Now, Piaget's stages of development, they stop at age 15. There's nothing after 15. It's like 15, we are done, we are finished product, we are the way we're going to be for the rest of our lives. That's it. Bye-bye, he went home.

The guy who continued his work was a guy by the name of Sinnot.

Okay, we'll come to it. I'll write his name.

So, unknown to people, the work of Piaget today applies to adults also. But it's not the work of Piaget. It's the work of Sinnot. We'll talk about it later.

Okay. Let's start with Piaget.

Piaget said that 0 to 15 is divided to 4 stages. The first stage is sensory motor stage. That's 0 to 2. 0 to 2 years old.

What happens in this stage?

The child absorbs sensa. Sensa means sensory inputs. The child absorb visual inputs, auditory inputs, olfactory inputs, tactile inputs. there are all kinds of inputs, and the child is flooded, drowning, overwhelmed by this sensa.

In order to try to somehow control this sensa, the child begins to move.

So when the child sees, for example, a light, the child will do this, you know, or the child hears a sound, the child will do this.

In Piaget's work, motion is an attempt to relate to sensa. The sensory inputs generate motions and gradually they are more and more and more coordinated.

Structure emerges for the first time. The first time there is a structured response.

In other words, some form of self-control, self-direction emerges because of sensa, because of the attack of the world on the baby, on the infant, on the newborn, the baby reacts by introducing order and structure into the world via movement, via motion.

And of course, when you as a baby, as a baby, I mean zero to two, when you as a baby introduce order and structure into a world that is utterly chaotic, utterly crazy making, you know. Imagine you are this size.

So when you introduce order and structure into the world, what are you doing?

You are introducing symbolism. Your movements symbolize your control, you're controlling the world symbolically.

To this very day in religion, we have symbolic movements. You know, these are all symbolic movements.

So this very day, we use motion in rites and rituals to introduce order and structure into a world that is potentially threatening and chaotic. We have movement, we use motion this way in almost all human fields, all human fields of life. Always we use motions, when we are overwhelmed by stimuli, we react actually mostly with motions. That's the most primitive reaction, motion.

So primitive symbolism emerges in this stage.

Another thing that happens at this stage is known as object permanence. Object permanence is Piaget's term.

There was another scholar, a bit later, not the same time as Piaget, but a bit later, she loved children. She observed children all the time. She spent most of her life with children. She opened kindergarten just to have children there and so on, but she was a scholar of children. She was a psychologist. Her name was Margaret Mahler.

And Margaret Mahler called it object constancy.

So object permanence is Piaget and object constancy is Mahler.

What is object constancy and object permanence?

Since we are talking about Piaget, I will use the term object permanence, although today we use object constancy. We no longer use permanence.

What is object permanence?

The baby needs mother. The baby needs food, the baby needs skin-to-skin contact.

In famous experiments by Harlow, these are known as the Harlow Monkey Experiments, Baby Rhesus monkeys, preferred touch to food when they were starving and they had they had the option of contact skin-to-skin contact with a fake mother, it was a doll, so they had this option and they had another option with a mother who had only food but no ability to contact. It was wires, metal wires.

So when they were dying, they were starving, they chose the contact. They chose the touch, not the food.

So these are the famous Harlow experiments.

As far as a child is concerned, touch is the number one priority, not food as we think. Touch is the number one priority, especially skin- to- skin touch. Of course, skin provides also smell, texture, many things.

Then the second place is food.

So the child depends on mother for skin-to-skin contact, food, warmth, of course treatment, changing diapers and so on so forth.

And so the child is terrified when mother is not there. Because it's a survival issue. The child needs to be seen by mother. The mother's gaze is crucial. The mother gaze signals to the child, I see you. Because I see you, don't worry. I will take care of you.

So when the child is not seen, when the child is ignored, when the child is neglected, the child panics, of course.

So what happens when mother leaves the room? The child panics, of course.

So what happens when mother leaves the room? The child panics. It's terror. Because the child doesn't know if mother will come back.

And this is known as object in permanence, or in Mahler's work object in constancy.

Gradually as the child grows up, what the child does, it takes a photo, a snapshot of mother. This is the famous introject. It internalizes mother. It creates a representation of mother in its own mind.

So now the baby has a real mother out there and an imaginary mother inside the baby's mind. This is the introject of mother, the image of mother, her avatar, her representation.

Now when mother leaves the room, the baby continues the interaction with the imaginary mother, with the introject of mother and doesn't panic. Now mother is permanent.

This process is known as internalization, interjection. Now mother is permanent. So now there is object permanence.

Now object in psychology means human being, which teaches you a lot about psychology.

So when we say object permanence means the permanence of another person, the constancy of another person, the presence, constant presence of another person. So in this case, mother.

So during the sensory motto of face, the child develops object permanence. It develops this image of mother that it can interact with when mother is away.

But this is only with a good mother, or what Winnicott called good enough mother.

When the mother is a dead mother, and Ray Green's dead mother, in other words, as I mentioned, emotionally absent, neglectful, ignoring the child, hating the child, also.

I mean, it's a dirty secret that one-third of women develop postpartum depression and actually hate the child.

And we are not talking about 3%, we are talking about like 33%.

So many children are hated, especially in the crucial period, the first six months.

So when the mother is not a good mother, it's very difficult to create a representation of mother in your mind because you don't want a bad person in your mind.

Yes? Would you like someone bad in your mind?

So such a mother disrupts the capability to interject. The child is afraid to put her in his mind, in its mind, because she's always frustrating, always neglectful.

So then there's no interject.

So this kind of child will not have object permanence until he dies for life. This kind of child, when he grows up, he has problems with object constancy.

So in relationships, this kind of person would be highly jealous, possessive, or on the contrary, rejecting. Like, if I don't fall in love with her, it will not hurt me when she abandons me. So preemptive abandonment. This is called preemptive abandonment.

So there are many strategies. This kind of person who was unable to develop as a baby, object permanence, is scarred for life. It's damage for life.

And afterwards, is unable to attach securely. Unable to develop secure attachment.

By the way, I recorded in Ohkid with poor Mariam, I recorded a lecture on attachment. So on the 4th and 11th of December, it's reason to celebrate, I won't be here, and I will place the lectures online so you can watch. I don't know if you want to watch.

Okay. There is a famous experiment known as A-not-B. A-not-B. It's also known as the A-not-B error.

You take a baby and you place an object, an object like this, red, shiny, babies love this. You place an object like this, and you let the baby observe the object.

And then you take the object away. You take the object away, and when you stimulate the baby to reach out for the object, the baby, so you move the object, yes, the object was here, you move it here.

And when you stimulate the baby to, the baby will reach here. Not here. A, not B.

So this is the A not B error, and it's very common between the ages of 0 and 2.

We are not sure why.

It could be that the baby is unable to create object constancy or object permanence. The baby did not create a permanent image of the object and when the object moves, the permanent image attaches to it. So there's not permanence. That's one possibility.

Another possibility is that babies have goldfish memories. They have very, very short memory. And so they would reach here. They could not memorize the next step.

Another possibility is that babies have something called motoric repetition. Babies make repetitive movements all the time. All babies make all the time repetitive movements. In this sense they are autistic.

And so Mahler, for example, called it the autistic phase, the normal autistic phase.

So they make repetitive movement. Maybe when we move the bottle, the baby just repeats the movement. It's nothing to do with the bottle.

We are not sure because very few babies agreed to be interviewed by us at age zero. They refuse to talk. They're like Russian dissidents. They refuse to talk. Yes.

What about the orientation? They already have, they're floated with sensors. They are trying to find, how to respond to all this.

In my, how I see it, is they're looking for space to orientate themselves in space. They recognize the space flooded with all the sensor.

So yes, that's memory function.

They also have this, if you put the mirror, even in front of the parrot, they go nuts, they can't work with it, and any other animal.

And this is the animalistic thing.

Mirror, it's interesting that you mentioned mirror because Lacan has a concept called mirroring. He said when the child sees itself in the mirror, that's when the beginning of the self, that's the beginning of the self.

The child identifies that there is someone there and then later identifies that it's the child, that it's him. And then the child says, oh, then I'm separate. I'm, you know, there's a separate me.

And so we know that animals, advanced animals, for example, chimpanzees, recently we discovered that dogs have this, recognize themselves in the mirror. They know it's me. It's not like a dog, but it's me.

And so, yeah, there is this question.

But the belief is that A not B experiment shows the beginning of object constancy. When the baby sees the bottle, the baby create a constant object. And then when we move the bottle, the baby relates to the constant object, not to the real bottle.

So that's an example of emerging object permanence, object constancy.

There is a problem attaching the constant object to the real object.

So there is a failure here of identifying the real object with a constant object.

This failure happens also, for example, with mother.

Because mother displays two types of behavior.

Sometimes mother is a good mother. She gives you food. Cookie, bookie, you know. We call it in English coo. She cooes. I hated it when I was one year old.

And sometimes mother is a bad mother. She won't give you food. You cry, she ignores you. She's busy. I don't know what.

So the baby has severe difficulty to reconcile the good mother with the bad mother. He cannot put the two aspects together and create an integrated view of mother.

This generates problems with object permanence.

So we have situations of A, not B, with mothers also, where the baby would reach out to mother where she's not. Mother is there, but the baby would do this. Or smile, mother is smiling, but the baby would smile. You know?

So we know that the process of developing object permanence is not snap.

Okay, Wednesday I don't have object permanence. Ah, it's Thursday, I have object permanence.

It's not like that. It's emergent and there's a lot of trial and error and the attempt to match the real object with the permanent image, the avatar, the introject, and then what if the object is bad or partly bad, how to reconcile this and so on?

So there are many solutions, for example.

Some babies adopt what is known as the moral default or moral. They say, mommy is not bad, I'm bad. If mommy ignores me, I deserve it. If mommy punishes me, definitely. I'm bad.

But then comes late.

That's not much later. Two years later. Two years, at age two. Not much later.

At some point, I believe, personally, that's not in the...

But I believe personally that at some point these contradictions and these conflicts between the permanent object and the real object are so bad, so massive, that this drives the child to separate.

I think the child is unable to put together the bad mother and the good mother.

The child says, mother is bad, I will die. No, no, no, no, mother is good, I'm bad. I'm bad, it's not pleasant, I can't, you know, horrible, I don't want to be better.

There's a lot of, it generates a lot of conflicts in dynamics which are not good. Not good.

And also it destroys the ability to perceive the world.

Because if you cannot obtain object permanence with your mother, then how can you apply this principle? Your mother is the first exercise, the first, you know, if you fail with this, so there's a sense of failure of object permanence.

And even when object permanence is finally there, it doesn't attach to the real object, because the real object, mother, is partly bad.

It's object permanence, it's a representation of a mother that is idealized, the consequence of splitting.

So it's not working, to cut a long story short, object permanence is a great idea. I think in reality it creates too much dissonance.

At some point the child says, the hell with it. You know, I'm going to get rid of the frustrating object. I'm going to get rid of the source of the dissonance. In other ways, I'm going to separate from mother.

And I think this drives separation individuation. I believe this is the cause.

Okay.

So this is the A, not B. And this is the sensory motto phase, stage.

The next one is known as pre-operational phase. It is between the ages of 2 and 7.

In this phase, there is beginning of acquaintance and manipulation of words, images, drawings. Kids begin to doodle and scribble and all this.

They're beginning to be stable concepts. For example, inside, outside. Solid, liquid, these are concepts. So beginning to be concepts at this stage.

And rudimentary, basic reasoning, you know. If I'm bad, I'm punished. If I put my head on a hot stove, I will be burned. So some basic reasoning, mainly sequential or consequential reasoning. In other words, A leads to B. A causes B. So I should avoid A or whatever. So this kind of reasoning, basic concepts and so forth.

But there are no what Piaget called operations. In Piaget's term, an operation is a representation, an inner representation of a real life situation. So you create an internal movie which captures the real life. Very similar to Marian's camera. Your Marian captures a real life situation on a medium, on a camera, unfortunately for him.

The child does the same. The child captures a real-life situation on the camera of his mind.

And this is known as operation in Piaget's language. It's known as operation.

Pierre said that operations are reversible. You can create an image or a movie of a real-life situation and then you can go backwards.

For example, you can think about the beginning and then move to the middle and go to the end. You can undo things in your imagination. What if I did not drop the plate? It would not break. So you can kind of hypotheticals and so.

But up to age seven, according to Piaget, it's wrong. I told you all the signs of Piaget is wrong. That is not true. Up to age seven, according to Piaget, operations are not possible. Children are not able to create a mental representation, video-like, mental representation of real-life situation.

We discovered this is not true. We discovered that children are capable of this, as early as age three, actually. And even a bit earlier, depending how you define it.

So, but I'm teaching you Piaget, so this is it.

During the pre-operational phase, there are several tendencies or several traits, or I don't know how to call them even, several processes, cognitive processes, that are characteristic of this phase. These processes survived. In other words, we still use these processes. We still think they're correct.

The first one is egocentrism.

Now, egocentrism doesn't mean, for example, that I have coffee, and I will never, ever share it with Lydia. Or Marian. Also, I will not share it with Marion, because I'm egocentric.

No, that's not what Piaget meant. In other words, when Piaget says egocentric, it doesn't mean selfish. What he means is that you see everything from your point of view.

So, for example, I'll give you an example. You immediately understand.

There's a child, she's holding the phone. And she's talking to father, daddy. And daddy says, hello, how are you? Are you good? And she does this. And then he says, can I talk to mommy? And she does this.

She doesn't speak. She cannot put herself in her father's place and say, father cannot see me. I have to talk. She can't do that. She sees everything from her point of view. And from her point of view, she did give an answer. She nodded her head, you know?

So from her point of view, there was a conversation here. She cannot put herself in father's place.

So this is an example of egocentrism, seeing everything from your point of view.

The second process is known as magical thinking.

Magicalthinking.

Magical thinking is when you believe that your thoughts, your wishes, your imagination, they have a real impact on reality, a real impact on the world.

So for example, a child says to his father, I wish you die, and then the next day the father dies. This kind of child would feel horrible, would feel guilty.

As far as this child is concerned, the wish for his father to die, made his father okay so there's a belief that whatever you think now even among adults you have the nonsense of law of attraction manifesting the secret, all these coaching for idiots.

And they say there that if you just put your mind to it, if you really, really want something, if you decide, if you focus, the universe will arrange itself and you will get what you want it.

This is magical thinking, of course.

Another form of magical thinking is conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories is a specific form of magical thinking, of course.

Another form of magical thinking is conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories is a specific form of magical thinking, known as conspiracyism in psychology. It's a trait.

So conspiracy theories believe that the world arranges itself in various ways, and only their minds can see it.

The conspiracy theories believe that he sees something that you don't see. He sees something you don't see.

He will try to explain it to you, to teach you, to educate you, but to begin with his ability to see is different to yours. He is unique.

This is magical thinking.

So, at the ages of 2 to 7, there is a lot of magical thinking. Something crosses your mind, and you are confused. Do you think it happened in reality, actually?

And that's very disorienting, because you cannot create what is known as reality testing.

Reality testing is when you can gauge and evaluate reality properly.

And it's very difficult to have reality testing when you have magical thinking.

Because everything that passes through your mind, you think it's reality.

Do you remember when we discuss psychosis?

It's essentially a psychotic feature because everything that's happening in your mind is reality. That's exactly psychosis.

Magical thinking is a psychotic feature, and psychotics have a lot of magical thinking, of course.

And the final thing is animism.

To remind you, we are in the pre-operational phase, phase two in Piaget's stages of development.

So the last feature of this phase is animism.

It's when you believe that objects have a life, or they have a soul, or they are somehow animated.

So children, for example, would be convinced that when they fall asleep, the toys come alive. Toys come alive and celebrate.

There are even movies.

They're even musical, I think Mussovsky. Who made a musical about it?

Anderson, understands the stories like this, when the child goes to sleep, the toys come up.

This is animism. This is a form of animism.

At this age, at this stage, Piaget divides this stage to two parts.

The first part is known as symbolic. I'm confusing him with manner. The symbolic function stage. The symbolic function sub-stage or stage, it's when the child begins to form mental representations of objects.

He begins to draw. The child begins to draw.

What is drawing? Nothing.

Drawing is an amazing operation. Amazing thing.

Because when you draw, you need to capture reality and you need to believe that there is a correspondence between reality and your drawing.

Think about a map, a map of a city. It's an amazing thing because the citya map of a city. It's an amazing thing because the city is captured in the map. We also magically trust the map to lead us in the city. So we attribute magical properties to the map to kind of guide us in reality.

Similarly, when the child draws, many children attribute magic to the drawing. The drawings not only represent their experiences and so on so forth, but the drawings are imbued with magic. There's a lot of magic in the drawing.

So drawing is an amazing thing, and it is coupled with language, emergence of language.

In short, symbolic representations of reality. When we use a small amount of information or small amount of symbols to capture a lot of information, we compress, it's like a zip file, we compress reality into symbols.

And finally, this stage, which is to remind you the symbolic function, sub-stage, children engage in something called pretend play. Pretend play.

They pretend. They pretend to be a mother and they have dolls and they feed the dolls and they, you know, and so on so this is pretend play they pretend to be cowboys and Indians they pretend to be professors of psychology you know all kinds of things.

And the last sub-phase, and with that I promise you a break, the last sub-phaseis the intuitive thought sub-stage.

Intuitive thought, primitive reasoning, as I told you, if I dropped the plate, it will break, this kind of thing. A leads to B, causation, causation, curiosity.

At this stage between the ages of four and seven, there's a lot of curiosity. This is the stage where the child does. Why does the sun rise? Why people sleep? Why, until you bang the child with a pen? It stops.

Which is not a recommended way to raise children.

I must warn you.

Okay.

I will bang you with a pen a bit later.

As I said, the child throughout the pre-operational phase has impaired reality testing.

Impaired reality testing means the child cannot evaluate, gauge reality properly. It's not, reality sometimes is real, sometimes it's imaginary, sometimes it's magical, sometimes things go backwards, like the cause causes, the effect causes the cause, there's a big mess.

So there's no real perception of reality.

Remember, I told you the children cannot evaluate a car that is coming. They're going to say, wow, there's a car coming. If I step to the road, I will be run over. They can't do that.

There is a problem of gauging reality, appreciating it correctly.

So, this is even in this stage, there is something called Dunning Kruger effect.

Dunning Kruger.

Well, easily.

So, Dunning Kruger?

This is horrible. Where's my... Where's the other one? Oh.

Dunning-Kruger effect was described much, much later, long after Piaget, but it applies to pre-operational phase of Piaget.

Dunning-Kruger effect is when you're too stupid to realize you're stupid. Very simply put. You're so stupid, you cannot even realize you're stupid. And because you don't realize you're stupid, you think you're a genius.

That's a Dunning-Kruger effect, which affects 98.3% of the general population, it seems.

And so the child at this age has a Dunning-Kruger effect. The child believes that it knows much more than it actually knows.

So children at this stage become argumentative. They argue. They argue, they reject what you're telling them. They develop all kinds of theories about the world, that have nothing to do with the world or with reality, and so on and so forth.

By the way, just to explain, when the professor hates the students, he uses this marker. And when he really, really likes the students, he uses this marker. So I really, really like him.

Okay.

The next thing is known as centration. Centration is when the child focuses on one aspect, but ignores all the others.

So you would tell a child, for example, can you pour oil? I want to make an omelet. Can you pour oil?

So the child would focus on the oil bottle and would continue to pour oil until the whole apartment is because the child cannot simultaneously consider the oil bottle and the pan. He focuses on one thing only.

So this is centration. This is known as centration.

And finally, no, not fine, two more.

Lack of conservation. Lack of conservation.

Lack of conservation is a very fascinating phenomenon. It's when the child cannot imagine something that has changed as it was before he changed.

So, for example, imagine that I have two bottles. They are identical, two thermoses. They're identical. No, not this. They're identical. Okay?

And then I ask the child, are these two bottles, do they contain the same amount of coffee? And child would say yes. At this stage the child will say yes.

But then I take one of them and I pour this bottle into a very, very long and thin vase or whatever.

So now we have one bottle like this and one bottle which is very, very long and thin, but contains the same amount of coffee.

When you ask the child, which bottle has more coffee, it will say this.

Because the child cannot go back and say, wait a minute, let's go back. This coffee came historically, originally, this coffee came from a bottle like this. So it's the same.

The child cannot do this.

And similarly, when we take two patis, two plastilinas, and we make two balls, excuse me for the expression, make two balls. Okay?

And then we take one of them and we flatten it, make it very long. We don't do anything else, just flatten it.

And we ask the child, which one has more potty? The child would say this.

It cannot go back and say this, it used to be this. There's no used to be this. There's no going back.

So this is called lack of conservation, and there are many experiments that Piaget conducted, very famous experiments.

You remember that I told you that a child is egocentric, can see everything only from its own point of view?

If you wish to learn more, for some oblivious reason, then you can go online and look for the three mountain experiment, three mountain experiment of Piaget that proves egocentrism.

And for this, you can look at experiments with clay and with water, which Piaget conducted.

And he discovered all this, and all this is valid. All this we're still using. And it is known as the Beaker experiment, these experiments.

Okay.

I told you that many of the so-called discoveries of Piaget have been refuted by modern studies.

From time to time I will mention the scholars whose work contradicts Piaget.

So one of them is Rochelle Gelman, and she discovered that many of the things that Piaget, especially conservation, the ability to conserve.

You remember when you pour coffee to a taller and all this, the party?

So she discovered that conservation appears earlier than age 4, 5, 6, 7, appears sometimes at age 3. And even in rare cases and in attenuated forms, some other form in age two.

And she discovered that conservation can be taught. You can teach children to evaluate the quantities and numbers and so on.

And she also discovered that children who had problems with attention developed conservation later than children whose attention was okay.

So children with attention deficit disorders were less good and also much slower in realizing.

So they simply couldn't pay attention. It was not a problem of evaluating quantities or reversing time, playing the movie backwards. It wasn't that problem.

She discovered that in many cases the problem was simply they didn't pay attention.

And they were all over the place, you know, like my students, for example.

So now we move on to the third stage, and that is the concrete operational stage, seven to eleven.

Remember that in Piaget's terminology, operations are the representation of real-life situations within the mind, creating a movie in the mind that represents situations in real life, that is operational. So operations, I'm sorry.

So when we talk about a concrete operational stage, it means creating movies in the mind about concrete, specific situations.

So between the ages of 7 and 11, the child begins to work with objects, is able to work and manipulate objects, put them together, build the Lego towers and all these kinds of things. The child can reason about concrete specific problems.

In other words, the child can create a representation in his or her mind of a real life situation and then solve it.

So if we present such a child with a problem, the child doesn't have to see the things. We can tell the child, for example, you know, what happens if I take one bottle and I add to it two bottles?

The child will visualize this. You don't need to really take one bottle and put two bottles. But the child will be able to visualize it in his mind and say, well, then there will be three bottles.

Children at this age can consider multiple dimensions of the same problem. So they can see the problem from this point of view, from that point of view, etc.

So if you talk to them about a situation, they can see it from each participant's point of view. And they can also see multiple dimensions.

For example, they can see that the bottle has height and width. They can see that the bottle has multiple dimensions, three in this case.

While children before the age of seven, they see the bottle as a painting. They see the bottle as two dimensions. Like animated cartoon, older children understand that the bottle has many dimensions.

So they can consider dimensions, properties, all kinds of qualities of things. This thing is soft. This thing is solid. This thing is..., this thing is solid, this thing is...

So for example, at this age, a child would understand that you cannot put this through this.

Because the child will have developed the concept of solidness, solidity.

So you cannot put this, but younger children, and very young children, definitely, three, four years old, they would try to do this, definitely. I saw it in my own eyes. They would try to put something through, you know.

So that's an example of ability to consider properties, data.

They classify objects. They map interrelationships between objects.

But at this stage, there is no abstract thought. Everything has to be connected to something real, a real table, a real bottle, a real person.

You can also, for example, tell the child, imagine that there is Jeanne and she lives in...

No way. You have to tell her, do you remember Auntie Bertha? And then the child will be able to...

So it has to be concrete, has to be specific.

Most children develop at this stage a capability known as seriation. The ability to create series.

So if you give them one marker this size and one marker this size, they will create a series from the longer marker to the shorter marker to the shorter marker, from long to short, from less solid to more solid, from deeper to shallower.

So they are able to create series.

If you give the same two markers to a four-year-old or a three-year-old, they would not order them this way. They would not order them long, short. What they would do, they would do this. So that they are equal.

So that younger children don't have seriation capacity. They cannot create series.

Transitivity is combining two logical conclusions and deriving a third one. Transitivity is a kind of extended syllogism. All of you know about transitivity. I will prove it to you right now.

If I find the eraser. What can you say about this? What is the third one? This is one, two, three. What's the third one?

Only those above the age of seven can answer.

C is bigger than D?

A is greater than B. B is greater than C. What's the...

C is bigger than C.

A is bigger than C. That's the third one.

If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then definitely A is bigger than C.

So this is transitivity, the ability to take logical argument number one, logical argument number two, and produce logical argument number three.

Okay? So this develops at age seven, and some people.

At age seven. I'm joking.

So transitivity.

Children at this stage develop logical, mathematical operations, the ability to work with abstraction, with logic.

They create theories, theories about the world. They create hypotheses. Then they test the hypothesis. And if the hypothesis is confirmed, it becomes a theory. And if it is not confirmed, they create another hypothesis.

So they hypothesize about the world. They are not hypothesizing like Albert Einstein, but whenever they come across a new situation, new people, circumstances, and so on, they create a hypothesis. They create, and then they test it. They test it. And then they see if it works or not. So they are hypothetical deductive.

Children at this stage are hypothetical deductive. They're better informed. They collect a lot of information all the time, like an information sink.

And they're very concerned with relative positioning.

They begin to compare themselves, especially to peers.

That's why, unfortunately, social media companies target these ages because they compare to each other.

You have more likes than me. You are more popular than me.

And so there's this comparison. This comparison creates envy.

And according to studies by Twenge and Campbell and others, these comparisons, known as relative positioning, these comparisons create depression and anxiety. So it starts at this age as well.

One more thing that is very, very interesting.

Children at this age become idealistic. They develop ideals.

Ideals about themselves, this is known as ego ideal. Ego ideal means this is the way I should be. Or when I grow up I want to be.

So at this stage they tell you, when I grow up, I want to be a fireman or astronaut or a politician or whatever. So there is this ideal of myself, ego ideal. There's ideal society.

They become very idealistic at this stage. They're concerned with justice, beginning to be, concerned with justice.

And they have utopian thinking.

In other words, they want to see the world as a better place, a utopian place.

Not better universally, but better for themselves.

They want to be in a world that caters to their needs, satisfies and gratifies them, always there for them.

So it's again egocentric and egotistic this time. It's also selfish.

So they have a utopian view about the world in the sense that they think mother, father, friends, teachers, the world at largeenvironment, the apartment, for example. They're very picky and choosy about the apartment. My room is this, you know, devices that they own.

And so they want to design the world, to shape the world, to fit them like a hand in a glove.

So this is utopian thinking.

And within this utopian world, which is designed for them, tailored, customized for them, within this utopian world, then they can become what they dream. They can become what they wish. This is known as wish fulfillment.

And what is it that they wish to become?

Depends? You know, football player, actor, whatever.

Sometimes they just wish to become, for example, beloved by mother.

So their dream is to, mother to love me more.

These are especially abused children, or traumatized children, or neglected.

So these kind of children, their ego ideal would be, I will shape myself for mother to love me more.

These people later in life become people pleasers. They please other people compulsively because they're all the time looking for love. And they try to bribe other people. They buy gifts to other people, give services to other people, and so just for people to love them.

So ego ideal doesn't mean I want to be an astronaut or want to be a fireman or I want to be a politician. Definitely doesn't mean I want to be a professor of psychology.

It means I want to be something or someone in an ideal world so that I feel happy, I feel good.

So this is utopian thinking.

By the way, not connected to the lecture, do you know where the word utopia comes from?

No.

You?

No.

No. That's the kind of class I like, because then I can appear to be superior. I'm not joking, actually.

Utopia is two words, not one. First of all, it's a book written in the beginning of the 19th century.

So utopia means no place. U no. Topos, topos, place. Utopia, no such place. That's what it means.

So they have utopian thinking. Okay. They are idealistic.

The transition to the next phase, the transition to the next phase, which is the formal operational phase. That is the height of...

So, idealism and all this utopian thinking, they all start at the end of the concrete operational phase. But they blossom, they become dominant in the formal operational phase.

Formal operational phase 11 to 15.

At this age, there is abstraction. They are capable of abstract thinking, not concrete, not tied to any specific examples, any specific objects, any specific people, but thinking in principle. Logic.

Utopian thinking now is super dominant. These 11 to 15, they can even become social activist, so this is utopian thinking about ideal, ideal, ideal, ideal, ideal, me, ego ideal.

They have hypothetical deductive thinking. All this, that starts at the end of the concrete operational phase becomes dominant in the formal operational phase.

They search a lot, they're curious, and relative positioning is the number one thing, because at this stage between 11 and 15, they learn much more and imitate much more peers.

They don't anymore interact with parents or teachers in any meaningful way, but they derive most of their knowledge, most of the behavioral cues, behavioral scripts, everything they imitate peers. And everything they learn from peers.

For example, the number one source of sex education is peers, not books, not pornography even, not teachers, peers.

So at that stage, everything that I've mentioned before that is at the very end of the concrete operational phase, at this stage, in this stage, the formal operational phase becomes explosive. This is dominant.

And so you have people who can think abstractly are concerned with justice, the ideal world, themselves as ideal people in an ideal world. They theorize, they create theories and hypotheses and make deductions constantly. They are curious about the world. They learn and study a lot. And they are super concerned with relative positioning. Their position compared to the peers. And they learn a lot from peers.

That is the end of Piaget. Or at least his work. It's the end of his work. That's where he stops.

And he says, from now, from 15 on, until you die, you are the same.

Which is, of course, completely untrue.

And here we would better listen to Erickson than to Piaget.

Anyhow, Pierre says that it is at this final stage, towards the final stage, like the age 15, 16, and so on, the idealism, I'm sorry, declines and is replaced by realism.

Also may have been true for his age, but not today. It's completely untrue.

Actually, we see that the average age of social activists, climate activists, and so on so forth, peace activists, there are all these people Black Lives Matter we see that the average age is in the mid-20s not 15.

So okay there was another guy, Sinnot.

Sinnot added one stage to Piaget, and that is the post-formal stage.

People are reflective. They think all the time. Everything they analyze. Everything they...so, this is reflection. They're a constant state of reflection.

They're relativistic. They don't take anything as fixed. They don't take anything as absolutely true. They're relativistic. They can compare. They can analyze. They can agree to some elements and disagree with other elements. They're much more flexible. The thinking is much more flexible.

And they're contextual. Whenever they think about something, they put it in context.

So this is the stage of Sinnot, which is a stage after Pierre.

Sinnot said that people at this stage are solutions oriented. So he agrees with Piaget that people become more realistic as they age, less idealistic and more realistic.

He said that people are provisional. In other words, they don't take anything for granted. They assume that everything has a beginning and an end. They take everything with a grain of salt. They think, maybe it's true, maybe it's all provisional. Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent.

So they're highly provisional. I said that they're realistic, pragmatic.

And they recognize the impact of emotions on thinking and decision making. So they realize that some people have emotional thinking.

Emotional thinking is a disruption in thinking, a distorted cognition, where the emotions influence your thinking, and you begin to misidentify your emotions as reason. You think your emotions are reasonable. Your emotions are logical. Your emotions should be taken as facts.

So many people are very emotional about something and that they believe that this means that this is a fact. But that's the way it is.

And people also tend to confuse opinions with facts. This is my opinion. But they say it's a fact also.

So once I was online, it's a true story, I was on a forum. And one guy said, the Battle of Hastings in the United Kingdom was in 1066. And another guy came on and said, no, it wasn't. It was in 1093 or something.

And the first guy said, no, it was in 1066. Here is a quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was 1066.

And the second guy said, well, that's your opinion. My opinion, it was in 1093. That's it.

So from now on, opinions are facts. That's it.

So we live in such an environment and Sinnot identified this.

And he said that adult, mature adults are able to tell apart. They're able to say this is opinion, not fact, or this is emotion, not fact.

Which shows you that the majority of people nowadays are not adults.

Actually, this is not just a gripe. You know what is a gripe? Complaint. Like, you know old people? They constantly complain. All the young people who are not like that.

So, what I'm saying here is not the kind of old men bullshit. It's not, it's reality.

Studies have shown that only one in three people obtain a pass through the formal operational and post-formal stages. 70% of people never make it. They remain stuck in the concrete operational phase, which is typical of age 7.

That's a fact. These are the studies.

So we live in an environment where 70% of people are actually 7 years old, as far as reasoning, as far as analysis, as 7 years old. That's the situation.

By the way, another fun fact, IQ has declined by 7 to 10 percentage point in the past 40 years.

Another fun fact.

There's a movie which I strongly recommend that you watch. Idiocracy. I don't know if you saw it.

At this stage people are starting to search for meaning.

Life is just life, obtaining things, property, getting married, this, that, is not very fulfilling, because you need a vision, you need a meaning, we discussed it, Victor Frankl, you know, in search of meaning, you need meaning.

If you don't have a narrative, if you don't have a definition of why you are here for, what are you here for, what's your goal, how are you going to make a difference, what change are you going to induce? And what's your legacy?

If you don't have all this, then very soon you will be depressed and anxious and worse.

So this is the stage where people begin, like after age 15, where people begin to look for meaning and for wisdom.

Search for meaning results in cumulative wisdom.

And so they begin to think back on critical life experiences. They begin to remember, reminiscences. They begin to reflect on what has happened to them.

And depends on the person. Some people are open to experiences. There is even a dimension of personality known as openness.

So some people are open to experiences. Some people are not.

If you are not open to experiences, you don't have many experiences. If you don't have many experiences, you can't become wise and you can't find meaning.

Openness is intimately connected to meaning. People who are not open-minded, rigid, not flexible, unable to see the others' point of view, not curious to learn, and so on. These people are impoverished. They have a constricted inner life.

And consequently, they cannot find meaning and they cannot find wisdom. And they also have difficulties to regulate themselves emotionally and otherwise.

Because you regulate yourself very often using memory. You say, ah, this happened to me before. This happened to me before and I survived, let's say. So I don't need to panic.

But if you don't have experiences, anything that happens is threatening, it's new, and you don't have the tools to cope with it.

And so emotional regulation, sense of humor, creativity, they all depend on openness, on accumulation of life experiences, on the ability to reflect back on these experiences and analyze them, and if you don't have any of this, then you're in trouble.

There are two processes involved in all this mess, according to Piaget. The processes are organization and adaptation.

You organize things all the time. You organize your experiences, you organize realities. All the time there's a process of introducing structure and order. You impose structure and order.

And you're also adapting all the time.

Now, adaptation is a very misunderstood concept. Adaptation is when you change your cognitions, when you change your emotions and when you change your behaviors, in order to obtain better outcomes, better consequences in an environment that has changed.

So adaptation is reaction to change.

If there's not change in your environment, there's no need for adaptation. And there's no need for you to evolve.

People say to develop personally is always good. That's not true.

Sometimes if you're in a stable environment and you evolve, that's bad. It's a bad idea.

Because you are out of tune with the environment. You become a different person who is maladapted, not adapted to your environment.

So it's very important to bear this in mind.

Personal development, personal growth, personal evolution should always be reactions to changes in the environment. And we should not induce them artificially. We should not pursue them as a goal.

They're not a goal. They're a mechanism. They're a reactive mechanism.

So adaptation is this.

Adaptation is through interaction. You interact with the environment, you try this, you do this and so on, until you finally find the equilibrium, finally find the balance, which allows you to be self-efficacious, allows you to extract beneficial outcomes from the environment.

But very often people mal-adapt. In other words, they adapt, but it's a wrong adaptation.

And then their situation becomes worse. They're less efficient. They're less able to cope. They're less able to survive.

And this is in itself a very interesting question.

Why do people maladapt? Why do we have the option to develop the wrong adaptation? Isn't it strange?

Evolution should have eliminated it. By now, we should be able to only adapt positively, never negatively. Why in many, many cases, people adapt negatively.

And so this is a separate question, why maladaptations exist.

I mean, we take everything for granted, you know? We take evolution of children, growth of children for granted. Everything for us is normal. It's normal to adopt. It's normal to grow up.

Nothing is normal. Nothing should be taken for granted. It's not true. Everything is contingent. Everything is dependent, crucially, on context, environment, changes, developments, experiences, memories, so many things operate together.

And so it is not guaranteed that a child will develop. And actually, as I told you, studies show that vast majority of people never develop.

We could say, and this would sound crazy to you, that growing up is the exception.

Development, personal development and personal growth are outliers. They're exceptions. They are not the rule.

The rule is to not grow up and not to develop. That's the rule, statistically. The vast majority of people don't.

Another 15% of people have personality disorders, which by definition is not growing up. The personality disorder is when the personality is disrupted. Don't grow up.

If you take this 15% and add to them the 70% something like 10% drop.

So we are studying not what happens to humanity typically. We are studying the exceptions.

Similarly, maladaptations. We're talking about maladaptations. If you maladapt, if you adapt wrongly, you become depressed, you become anxious and so on.

Today, half the population in the world have depression, anxiety, and personality disorders. Half. Half.

In other words, maladaptation is as common as positive adaptation. And we really, really need to ask the question, why? What's the use of maladaptation? Because if it's not useful, why didn't it disappear?

And we will discuss it in the next class or something.

Okay, long-suffering students, you're free to go.

Okay, thank you for coming.