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With unflagging zeal and unflinching determination in face of many obstacles, Professor Jean Piaget has continued a systematic exploration of the development of mental life from the earliest beginnings to the age of about six years by a purely objective behavioristic and experimental method since 1926. In that year, the first of his translated books “The Language and Thought of the Child” appeared. In the thirty years following, we saw ten other volumes published covering judgment and reasoning, child's concept of the world and of physical causality, moral judgment, psychology of intelligence, play, dreams and imitation, concept of number, origins of intelligence, and finally the volume presently under review. This has been an enormous effort carried on from Geneva, Switzerland with many collaborators.
Unfortunately Piaget's work has remained essentially unappreciated and little used. Why? The whole trend during the past thirty years has been one of dynamic depth psychology; it has been the flood-tide period of Freudian influence. Piaget has gone his own way; his has been a thoroughly non-dynamic, non-freudian experimental work which only now is beginning to grain respect from the psychoanalytically oriented workers, and is first beginning to be fully integrated into the dynamic framework. Piaget's work has been the only consistent experimental observational line of work which when carefully examined bears out many of the Freudian assumptions, intuitions, and insights for which the analysts have had little or no experimental proof. Sectarianism is often a high price paid at the expense of the neglect of much work in allied fields. Another factor in the rather slow utilization of Piaget's work has been a cumbersome style, detailed protocols that make for very dull reading, a special terminology of his own which is deadly, and a lack of obvious interest in dynamic theories of any kind. He has, in his own way, stubbornly (until very recently) refused to see the dynamic