The Developmental Psychologies of Jean Piaget and Psychoanalysis. (Psychological Issues, 1960, Vol. II, No. 1.): By Peter H. Wolff. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1960. 181 pp.

Developmental psychology is at last coming of age. In recent years there has been an accelerating activity in this area, especially in personality development, with clarification and solidification of hypotheses concerning patterns and sequences of growth, probably species-universal, and categories of variables which determine development. Data of one sort or another about growth are relatively abundant. But the two major problems of motivational and cognitive or intellectual development for the most part have been attacked in isolation from each other—segmentally, we might say opportunistically and from varying theoretical positions, or from no position at all. Until relatively recently few experimenters have formulated their specific problems against a background of inclusive or global hypotheses or clearly stated their assumptions about development. Certainly among 'academic' psychologists a bias against the descriptive, the clinical, the not-perfectly-controlled-in-laboratory sort of data collecting, and an overfervid respect for statistical analysis have led to preoccupation with the phenotypical rather than the genotypical human being.

Two notable exceptions have been Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. Classical freudian motivation theory, which has actually been generalized as an over-all theory of personality development based on an enormous accumulation of clinical data, has continually concerned the psychoanalytic group and has finally penetrated to the 'academic' psychologists who have set up longitudinal growth studies, cross-cultural studies, and species-comparative studies. Both groups have found support for classical psychoanalytic motivation theory but have also shown growing awareness of its theoretical shortcomings or inadequacies, of unanswered questions, and of apparent contradictions in the interpretation of clinical and experimental data.

Two allegedly conspicuous inadequacies of classical psychoanalytic theory lie in its failure to account fo