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There are those who believe that Piaget is to the domain of cognitive psychology what Freud was to the domain of instinctual and affective psychology. As Freud's thought led to a revolution in the understanding of the irrational and unconscious factors of the mind, Piaget's theories led to a revolution in understanding the rational mind. Both men came to understand the operation of the adult mind through a developmental consideration. They were both trained in the biological sciences: Freud was a physician with a special interest in physiology, and Piaget is a biologist with a special interest in philosophy. Piaget thinks of himself as a genetic epistemologist. When he concluded his advanced studies in philosophy at the age of twenty-four, Piaget was interested in some epistemological problems not understood to his satisfaction. As a trained biologist he thought his questions could be answered through an investigation of the development of the thought of the child. In his work he searches for an answer to the perennial epistemological question, How do we come to know reality? Every psychoanalyst assumes that he knows reality and that hopefully, by the end of the treatment, the psychoanalysand will have modified his distortions of reality. Since the advent of ego psychology, more emphasis has been placed on understanding the development of the ego, of which reality-testing is a major function. Psychoanalytic thought has considered this problem in a general way, but Piaget has studied the development of perception and thought in exquisite detail. Over fifty years ago he started an ontogenetic consideration of Kant's a priori categories of thought: space, time, quantity, and logic—the modes through which we know reality. He rejected the assumption that these modes are given to us a priori, assuming instead that they are constructed by the child in his interaction with the nature of things and so are a product of his development. Today Piaget is still exploring how we c