Conscious and Unconscious

IT MAY BE OF VALUE TO PLACE Dr. Tenzer's interesting contribution within Piaget's own reflections on psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, in particular concerning the issues of the unconscious

and the conscious. Remembering that Piaget's theory is above all a theory of cognition, means that he is chiefly interested in the way by which intellectual operations, conscious and unconscious, are built, how they come to exist, develop and are integrated and stabilized in the child's mind. Piaget is also engaged in understanding from where these operations derive. He focuses on these aspects of psychology because his purpose is mainly an epistemological one: the understanding of the construction of knowledge and the comprehension of its ontogenetics with the history of science.

Piaget and Freud both explored the relationships between the ontogenesis and the phylogenesis, that is, the implications on a mental level of a biological principle. From that point of view, both were influenced by Darwin.

Piaget is often considered as chiefly interested in cognition but as early as 1920 (as we shall see later) he provided us with insights into the relationship between cognition and affectivity as well as his views about psychoanalysis. Yet his major intent is not a psychological one but a philosophical one. His ideas are never purely speculative. As he cautions us in Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (Piaget 1965/1971) philosophical reflections should only occur within an experimental framework and speculations should always be examined within a context of facts. Here Piaget agrees with Freud, although their methodology differs. The latter used psychopathology to establish facts about knowledge, whereas the former used normal children for his observations. What Piaget does is to extract developmental facts and relate them