Cognitive Development, Types of Logic, and Psychoanalytic Theory

Cognitive developmental psychology and psychoanalysis may be viewed as two currents of the same historical stream with their beginnings in the late Victorian period. Five years prior to Freud's publication of the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and roughly coincident to his writing of the Project for a Scientific Psychology(1895), James Mark Baldwin published his seminal Mental Development in the Child and the Race(1895). This work, along with his three-volume study Thought and Things(1906, 1908, 1911), provided the conceptual foundation of contemporary cognitive developmental theory.

Cognitive developmental theory and psychoanalysis possess numerous commonalities. Both theories, from the onset, were strongly influenced by the theory of evolution. Both are developmental in conception and attempt to account for change in the mental structures that regulate behavior. Both investigate the individual case, employ stage constructs, and are qualitative in orientation. Finally, both provide a program for a general theory of human behavior.

Contemporary cognitive developmental theory is epitomized in the work of the late Jean Piaget and the late Lawrence Kohlberg. Piaget adopted the metatheory proposed by James Mark Baldwin with his application of stage, schema, assimilation, and accommodation to the study of regulatory structures. A generation later, Kohlberg (1958) fused conceptual contributions from Piaget (1932), John Dewey (1922), and George Herbert Mead (1934). In particular, Mead's formulation of the “generalized other” (1934) inspired Kohlberg to emphasize the significance of role taking in the development of cognitive structure (Kohlberg, 1969).

Within this framework, Kohlberg proposed a scheme of moral development through application of an “ideal typological” method adopted from the sociologist Max Weber. The method provides for the description of categories by