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Psycho-analysis has robbed mankind of some of its most cherished illusions. No longer can we look back nostalgically to our 'age of innocence' before libido and its attendant aggressions have crept like serpents into the purity of our minds. The curtain of amnesia at the end of Act 1 of the Human Situation has been lifted, and the villain of the piece revealed in his true incestuous, murderous colours. However tenaciously the unanalysed may cling to their picture of the infantile idyll in the face of the most blatant evidence to the contrary, the process of disenchantment is spreading. Freudian psychology has driven the child forever from his eden.
Piagetian psychology may have a similar, if less devastating, effect on our cognitive illusions of which there are also many. In the volume under review, a monument to the prodigious industry and fabulous productivity of the author, a further attempt is made to correct several misconceptions concerning the earliest mental functioning. By the method of 'genetic analysis' Piaget explores the basic spatial ideas of the child through the course of their development and reaches some most interesting conclusions