Page - 121 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Development of thinking 121 later afford him the capacity for self -reflection as well as for integrating acquired insights. I will now describe the concept of intellectual development in adolescence as seen by Piaget. 4.1 The capacity for abstract thinking according to Piaget Undoubtedly, the most elaborate theory of cognitive development was developed by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Already as a teenager, he wrote articles on the development of the natural world; after receiving his doc- toral degree at 21 years old, he shifted his interest to human development. In his research into the intelligence of small children, he was less interested in their cor- rect answers than in their incorrect answers, wherein he sought to find the key to how young children think. Piaget found that the unique quality of child thinking was manifested in the similar structure of “incorrect” answers given by a variety of children. Piaget recognized that although a child’s knowledge determined his answers, there exists a biological process of maturation that makes it easy for him to understand the world – no special teaching is required. The same pattern encompasses various thought processes within a given phase of development: when a child can recognize that 15 objects remain identical although exhibited in different spatial patterns, then he can also recognize that there could be the same amount of water in a short wide glass as in a tall thin one – i.e., he already has the capability to recognize constancy and conservation. The impetus for these changes in thinking, according to Piaget, lies in the maturation process, which in turn is dependent on a “reasonable” environment to develop properly. Yet the effect of the environment on maturation is limited: a 13 -year -old child will master the thought operations typical for his age with- out particular instruction. Piaget understands maturation as an active process, in which children seek out information and stimulation in their environment as matching their particular developmental stage. Maturation, according to Piaget, is not comparable to genetically determined neurophysiological programming of instincts, since biology merely paves the way for how the individual deals with them (Piaget 1970, 69). Piaget assumes that the active construction of real- ity occurs through using “schemes” – i.e., particular structures of organizing and interpreting information. With the young child, these schemes are based in sen- sory and motoric information acquired through sucking and grasping, but after infancy, schemes become symbolic and represented through words, ideas and concepts (see Arnett and Hughes 2012, 83). Piaget distinguishes between two schemes: “assimilation” and “accommoda- tion” (Piaget 1970, 53ff ). The biological conditions for his theory are founded on the following basic assumptions: 1 An organism adapts to its environment during the course of its development and in conjunction with the interactions and self -regulation characterizing its