American Psychology Just Before Piaget

Abstract

Jean Piaget first came to New Haven, Connecticut, in September of 1929 as a member of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology. At that time, he was one of the young European stars who joined Ivan Pavlov, Wolfgang Kohler, Edouard Claparede, and James McKeen Cattell to celebrate the first meeting in the United States of International Psychology (Ninth International Congress, 1930). l Piaget came to New Haven again in March of 1953, and, although he was not well known to the local psychologists, his hostess arranged for a meeting of the graduate clinical proseminar to hear his remarks (he spoke about perception).2 How different was his visit in May of 1970, when Yale awarded Piaget an honorary doctorate and the usually contrariwise seniors of the college burst into a cheering standing ovation to him. A more numerical expression of the variation in American response to Piaget is contained in Figure 1 . The relatively stable flat line plots the published contributions of Piaget between 1920 and his death in 1980 (McLaughlin, 1988), and his adoption as an American icon is illustrated in the line showing the references to Piaget or to his methods over the same stretch of years. It was a prodigious rate of change, and it must have been strange for a man in his mid-60s as the graph turned vertical. Much of the story in this Special Section is about the curious cultural phenomenon between the early 1950s and the 1970s, when Piaget went with dizzying speed from being absent in the common secondary literature to assuming the role as savior, not only of cognitive and developmental psychology, but also of American education and of the child as thinker (Inhelder & Piaget, 1955/1958; Piaget, 1936/1952, 1937/1954, 1941/1952, 1947/1950, 1950; Piaget & Inhelder, 1948/1956). The task of the present essay is, however, to catch American psychology on the wing in (say) 1953 or 1954, as Piaget's grand intellectual arrival was just beginning. I try to display the variety of American academic thought in psychology at that time first by sketching out the interests of the faculties at four institutions of regional and philosophical differences Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina.3