Back to Table of Contents
Developmental Context Referencing Piaget and his own early work with children, Busch further adds the developmental context for simple representations readily leading to psychic actions: Developmentally, thought is under the domination of action for a much longer period of time than has generally been recognized in psychoanalysis (Busch, 1989, 1995, 2009). A recent review of research in cognitive development (Flavell, Miller and Miller, 2002) concludes that, while Piaget underestimated certain characteristics of infants, the developmental changes Piaget observed still hold (See also the separate entry SYMBOLIZATION). The reason for this ‘action’ type of thinking has to do, in part, with the way thought processes develop. One of the major characteristics of all intelligence is that it is a matter of action. As Basch (1981) demonstrated, imaging is not the foundation for thought; action encoded in sensory-motor schema is that foundation. The main distinction between different stages of intellectual development is the degree to which actions become internalized and behavior is based upon symbolic representations rather than a motoric underpinning. It is important to note that the process of internalization is a very lengthy one. It is not until a child is around age 7 that one can talk of his having an integrated cognitive system with which he can organize the world relatively free from action referents. In a parallel conceptual frame, Anne-Marie Sandler (1975) also emphasized the importance of persistent modes of unconscious childhood cognition still used in the present when she stated: “What persists is not only the content of past memories, fantasies, defences, wishes, object relationships, instinctual urges and so on, but also schemata or structures representing organized modes of functioning, of making connexions, conceptions of causality or temporal sequentiality, of anticipation and justice, of the absence of chance events, the egocentric cognitive viewpoint — all the things which Piaget has investigated and described” (p. 373). […] “We have tended to neglect, I think to our cost, the information which can be provided by a knowledge of the dominant modes of unconscious childhood cognition which persist in the present and which are still utilized in the present ” (p. 375). Before a child is 7 years old, her thinking is heavily influenced by its motoric underpinnings. For example, a 5-year-old can successfully walk to school and negotiate a number of school corridors to find his kindergarten class, but he is unable to reproduce this in representational form, as his thinking is of a ‘doing’ type. The younger the child, the more his thinking will be dominated by action. For children capable of higher-level functioning, conflict and regression will heighten the tendency toward thinking based on action. Thus, what has not been sufficiently emphasized is that actions become increasingly woven into the fabric of the psychoanalytic process, in part, because of the long period of time the child's thinking remains under the influence of action determinants. Central conflicts and the adaptations to them are first experienced, organized, and worked out at an action level. Whatever the danger, the original defensive adaptations and compromise formations were undertaken in action terms, and thus may remain unavailable to higher-level ego functioning or remain in waiting as regressive flash points. Up until the oedipal phase and its crucial
797
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online