Piaget before Piaget

The great Swiss psychologist and theorist Jean Piaget (18961980) had much to say about the developing mind. He also had plenty to say about his own development, much of it, as Fernando Vidal shows, plainly inaccurate. In the first truly historical biography of Piaget, Vidal tells the story of the psychologists intellectual and personal development up to 1918. By exploring the philosophical, religious, political, and social influences on the psychologists early life, Vidal alters our basic assumptions about the origins of Piagets thinking and his later psychology. The resulting profile is strikingly dissimilar to Piagets own retrospective version. In Piagets own account, as an adolescent he was a precocious scientist dedicated to questions of epistemology. Here we find him alsoand increasinglyconcerned with the foundations of religious faith and knowledge, immersed in social and political matters, and actively involved in Christian and socialist groups. Far from being devoted solely to the classification of mollusks, the young Piaget was a vocal champion of Henri Bergsons philosophy of creative evolution, an interest that figured much more prominently in his later thinking than did his early work in natural history. We see him during World War I chastising conservatism and nationalism, espousing equality and womens rights, and advocating the role of youth in the birth of a new Christianity. In his detailed account of Jean Piagets childhood and adolescenceenriched by the intellectual and cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century NeuchtelVidal reveals a little-known Piaget, a youth whose struggle to reconcile science and faith adds a new dimension to our understanding of the great psychologists life, thought, and work.