Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

It is obvious that young children do not have the same reasoning and cognitive capacities as teenagers or adults. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the first to observe that the increase in cognitive abilities tends to progress in gradual, predictable stages. His theory, known as the four stages of cognitive development, is widely used as a reference in developmental and child psychology.

While people go through the steps in the same order, the pace of progress differs from person to person. Since each stage builds upon skills gained in the one before, Piaget did not believe that individuals could skip a step in their development.

The first stage, termed the sensorimotor stage, lasts from birth until 24 months. Early in life, humans interact with their environment primarily through their senses. Piaget theorized that this is the earliest form of learning. A defining milestone in this stage is development of object permanence.

Infants younger than six months old do not search out a familiar object that is out of sight. However, around six months of age, the infant begins to understand that objects and people can still exist even if they are hidden. Object permanence is a crucial aspect of understanding the wider world.

Children spend the following five years of their lives in the preoperational stage. Between the ages of two and seven, children will start to use objects in imaginative ways, which contributes to the phenomenon of dramatic play.

When children play with imaginary objects, they are engaging in realistic and creative thinking at the same time. This is an early stage of metacognition, or the ability to think about one’s thinking process. Early education teachers often encourage dramatic play in the classroom to further promote this type of cognitive development.

One limitation of the preoperational stage is the hyperfocus on only one element of reality. As a result, young children do not grasp conservation, or the idea that an object retains its properties despite changes to its appearance. Children at this stage also have difficulty understanding that a transformative process can be reversed.

Between seven and 11 years old, children enter the concrete operational stage. Children at this age can analyze more complicated problems and apply multi-step solutions. Cognition also starts to become internalized. Children at the concrete operational stage are better able to visualize and solve simple problems without using tactile objects.

The last stage, formal operational thinking, begins after 12 years old. At this point, young people can contemplate hypothetical and abstract realities. They can analyze a problem in a logical way by developing and testing theories.

Due to their inexperience, adolescents may apply abstract thinking in immature ways. For example, adolescents tend to center their worldview around their personal experiences. Taking on more responsibilities and experiences will eventually widen and refine their perspective.

Piaget believed that while most people master the concrete operational stage, very few progress to the final stage, formal operational thinking. Current research suggests that 40 percent of the adult population cannot engage in abstract cognition without supports, such as metaphors or real-life examples.

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The Early Beginnings of Talk Therapy

Talk therapy, otherwise known as psychotherapy, has evolved through the centuries into a more viable treatment option for mental illness. However, mental illness was not always considered a medical condition.

In the Middle Ages, following the fall of the Roman Empire, mental illness was regarded as a supernatural problem; “to be touched by witchcraft” was how some described the condition. And people who exhibited symptoms were tortured and forced to confess. However, the Ancient Greeks recognized mental illness as a medical problem. They developed condition specific methods for treating mental disorders such as bathing for depression and blood-letting for psychosis.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician who lived during the Renaissance, found the idea of demonic possession - the explanation for mental illness in the Middle Ages - absurd. A dissonance- a lack of psychological harmony- between man and the society he lives in was a better explanation. Most importantly, Paracelsus believed in the ideas that would influence psychotherapy tenets: prescription instructions, persuasion, and exhortation.

“Psycho-therapeia’ was introduced by Walter Cooper Dendy, a London surgeon, in his 1853 treatise, Psyche: A discourse on the birth and pilgrimage of thought. Two decades later, Daniel Tuke adopted the term “psycho-therapeutics” to describe the healing power of the imagination over the body, giving rise to the construction of mental institutions across the United States and Europe in the 19th century. Despite many of the methods employed by these institutions, including conversations between patients and staff in sober, structured environments, detached from the chaos of the cities, discharge rates were low while the number of intakes spiked.

The inability to rehabilitate patients in these asylums drove further explorations of new forms of therapy. German physician Franz Mesmer was convinced that within the mind existed hidden forces. A professor of medicine, Hippolyte Bernheim, described his use of hypnosis to treat his patients as psychotherapy. Paul Dubois rejected this view of psychotherapy, adopting the term to describe his method of treatment, dubbed “rational therapy.”

Elsewhere in Europe, the collaborative efforts of Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, and Josef Breuer, an Austrian physician and physiologist, laid the foundation for modern-day psychotherapy. The duo co-authored a book entitled “Studies on Hysteria” in 1895 and are credited with officially establishing psychoanalysis.

Keeping memories or thoughts in the subconscious, Freud believed, was what caused mental illness. He also believed that listening to the patient while interpreting their words, bringing memories to the fore, improved the treatment’s success and reduced the symptoms.

In their book, Studies on Hysteria, they described the Cathartic Method, which they had applied to a patient called Ana O (whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim). Subsequently, together they developed free association, the archetypical picture of psychotherapy where a patient is lying on a couch, discussing with a therapist.

America’s psychotherapy scene became redefined by a wave of psychoanalysts who flooded the New World after the Nazi’s conquest of Germany in 1933. The trained emigres, including Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson, would modify many of Freud’s concepts.

Columbia graduate Carl Rogers wrote the first of many books in 1939 which explored his approach to psychotherapy. Instead of a strict technique, he encouraged a free-form process. He preferred the term “client” to “patient” and created client-centered therapy. This form of therapy became first-choice among American psychologists and social workers after the war.