Live Life Team
The second generation French psychology began in a school in Geneva in 1918 due to the initiative of Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher who is best known for his cognitive development theory and genetic epistemology. This generation of French psychology focuses mainly on Piaget.
Back in 1918, Piaget decided to move away from his training Natural History and do post-doctoral work on psychoanalysis in Zurich, Switzerland. From Zurich he travelled to Paris, France in order to work at the Binet-Simon Laboratory. However, the Binet-Simon Lab was no longer operational because Binet had previously died in 1911. .Piaget was thus indirectly supervised by Pierre Janet, a professor at the College de France and Binet’s old rival. Piaget found that his job in Paris was relatively simple. He used the statistical techniques that he had learned from being a natural historian – he studied molluscs, and standardised Cyril Burt’s intelligence test for French children.
However, Piaget found his work to be boring, and so he thought of a way to make it more interesting and started examining why children make the mistakes they make. Through this idea, the emergence of his stage theory was formalised. Piaget travelled back to Switzerland, this time to Geneva. In the city, he worked at the Rousseau Institute with Edouard Claparède. Piaget achieved his first honorary doctorate in 1936, and acquired his award on “distinguished scientific contributions” in 1969.
Indeed, the second generation French psychology marked the development of child psychology as well as cognitive psychology.
