Blogging Chapter Two (Section Two, pp. 74-81)

[kellogg]

Yesterday J-Kitty the Cat was wondering why Piaget, with his soft white hands, and LSV, with his warm lap, have to sit so very far apart. It’s most inconvenient for a lazy little cat!

But there were good reasons.  For both men, the child is somewhere between autistic thinking and truly social thinking.  But for Vygotsky, the child starts out a social being, so the child is still very close to his or her social environment.  

The child’s “I” is really not yet  a  “me” but a “WE” (and it can include Mommy!) The child is thinking about the world, and not about himself. In fact, the child CAN’T think about himself, because the child doesn’t really have a “self” separate from the world yet.

Piaget disagrees. For Piaget, the child sits a lot closer to autism than to social, logical, adult thinking. Yes, the child is thinking about the world, and not simply about himself. But he’s thinking in a SELF-CENTRED way. The child is talking to the world, and not simply talking to himself, but he is talking in an EGO-CENTRIC way. When the child absorbs ideas, they are “assimilated”, deformed and distorted to fit the child’s EGOCENTRIC schemas.

Now, this assimilation means that experience will never “undeceive” the child, and living has no developmental effect at all! (Piaget has not really developed the concept of "accomodation" yet.) So J-Kitty asked: How does the child develop? That's what we have to find out today.

Yesterday it rained. But today the sun is shining. Sunny and Koala are out for a walk (Koala is still carrying her umbrella), and they meet our old friend LSV. Koala loves REAL leaves, not imaginary ones. As it turns out, this is the key to the whole problem.

Koala: Give me a leaf or I’ll EAT you.

LSV: Very well. Let’s turn over a new leaf. Forget about Piaget for a minute. Let’s read Piaget’s TEACHER, Professor Bleuler.

Sunny: Why? You said this was an IMMANENT critique. An IMMANENT critique means you just criticize Piaget from the INSIDE, using Piaget’s OWN ideas. Now you are going OUTSIDE Piaget, using Piaget’s teacher. You are telling the teacher on Piaget! That’s cheating!

LSV: Not really. You see, an immanent critique means you use the ASSUMPTIONS of a particular approach in your critique. You follow the ideas as far as you can and you see if they lead to a contradiction. Now, the assumption Piaget made was that the child is the product of BIOLOGY, of phylogenesis. So the child has the BIOLOGICAL selfishness of any another animal. That’s why the child RESISTS social thinking. Remember?

Koala: I can’t remember. I’m hungry! Leaves! Leaves! Leaves!

LSV: That’s the idea. The child can’t think of anything but his or her own needs. Now, you’d think that if anybody out there goes along with this idea, it would be BIOLOGISTS. Particularly biologists who study autism, that is, non-sociality. And Bleuler was not just Piaget’s teacher. He was a biologist. And he wasn’t just a biologist. He wrote a very important monograph about AUTISM.

Sunny: So autism is the starting point?

LSV: Yes, according to Freud. The little chick in the egg does not have to DO anything; the egg does everything. So the chick has only whims and wishes. The baby in the womb does not have to DO anything; the womb does everything. So the baby as only dreams and desires.

Sunny: But babies are pretty noisy. If they have everything they desire, why do they make so much noise?

LSV: Freud says that their desires are hallucinations, and so are their satisfactions. They dream of possessing the womb, the mother. They weep and wail. And by crying, they achieve a kind of hallucinatory satisfaction.

Koala: I’ve never heard of that!

LSV: Neither has Bleuler. Bleuler says that the chick in the egg eats REAL food, not imaginary food, and when there isn’t anything else to eat in the egg, the chick has to hatch. The child does not cry for imaginary milk; and only real milk will make the child stop crying. Older children NEVER prefer an imaginary apple to a real apple. And even the so-called “savage” and the madman are only crazy dreamers when they are talking about things that they don’t know about and don’t understand.

Sunny: Just like us.

LSV: Exactly. So Bleuler says “autism” is really overgeneralized. We use autism for everything: for the chick, the baby, the older child, the “savage” and the schizophrenic. They are ALL autistic. In fact, Freud uses “autism” to mean almost any form of unconsciousness. And he uses the unconscious a lot!

Koala: 뜨르랑꿀꿀…zzzzzzzz…huh?

Sunny: So…Bleuler wants to undergeneralize it?

LSV: Sort of. Bleuler wants to REFINE it. He wants to ANALYZE it. He wants to ABSTRACT AWAY the various pathological aspects of autism and reduce it to its essentials.

Koala: The essentials of autism? What are the essentials of autism?

LSV:  Bleuler says that autism is really just non-realism, or “irrealism”. It’s a NEGATION of the child’s orientation to reality. But that means it CAN’T be primary, either genetically or functionally or structurally.

Sunny: Why not?

LSV:  You tell me!

Sunny & Koala: Hmmm.....

Sunny: So autism just sort of appears, after the earliest stages of realism. And then it runs parallel to realism. So we are all kind of schizophrenic, with one autistic personality and another realistic one.

LSV: Well, that's what Bleuler thinks. But I don't agree. I don't see autism and realism as being PARALLEL. They are more SERIAL. Irrealism and realism are a kind of developmental sequence.

Koala: A SEQUENCE? You mean we all go zig-zagging around, like bears in the eucaplyptus trees?

Sunny: Like drunks going from one lamp-post to another?

LSV: Remember what Superman said? Like psychologists going from the idea that thinking and speech are the SAME to the idea that they are completely different. Yes, the child zig-zags from hopes to truths, from wishes to realities, from dreams to plans to realizations, whether realizations of success or failure.

Koala: Hey, wait a minute. You told J-Kitty we were going to explain how the child develops! All we really did was talk about whether autism is primary or not. And this ziggy-zaggy stuff is hardly a real explanation.

LSV: I said we were going to see why Piaget's theory doesn't account for development. And we're not really done with that yet. All we did was look at the problem genetically, functionally, and structurally, that is, THEORETICALLY. Next we have to look at the FACTS.

Sunny: The facts? What facts?

LSV: Piaget's facts. This is where Piaget's real strength is. But his facts point in a rather different direction than he thinks. We'll see where in the next section!