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ARE PIAGET'S THEORIES CONCERNING COGNITIVE development applicable to psychoanalysis? Can his findings clarify the way we conceptualize psychoanalytic processes? Judging from the plethora of references to Piaget in the psychoanalytic literature, many writers think so.
How is knowledge acquired? How do we construct and reconstruct our understanding of the world and our place in it? These questions are central to Piaget's genetic epistemology. The answers Piaget gives apply equally well to the infant's structuring of his world and the child's elaboration of it and to the scientist's explorations and discoveries. He claims that in each case knowledge is acquired through the same mechanisms. If this is so, then it may be that the process of discovery in psychoanalysis is analogous to the child's discovery of his world as revealed by Piaget's experimental observations. It may well be useful to compare our clinical observations and the theories derived from them with Piaget's so as to see in what ways they converge or diverge.
Concepts used in psychoanalysis are sometimes amorphous, vague, hard to pin down. They may require examples in order to be understood. Perhaps by comparing them with Piaget's concepts—concepts that derive from very simple experiments with children—they can be anchored more securely to observable data.
I have selected the concept of insight for this discussion because it is similar to Piaget's concept of la prise de conscience, "the grasp of consciousness" (Piaget, 1974, 1976). Insight, like the grasp of consciousness, can be conceptualized as an active dual process. On the one hand, it makes what is unconscious conscious. On the other hand, it organizes and integrates what is now in awareness in such a way as to make it useful in other contexts.