The Birth of Personality: The Development of Independent and Moral Behavior in Preschool Children (The Developing Body and Mind Series)

Subbotsky Eugene V.

Harvester/Wheatsheaf

In the wake of Jean Piaget’s work on children’s understanding of reality, it is generally accepted that by age two, children assume that an object hidden in a box will remain there unchanged until someone tampers with it. Eugene Subbotsky persuasively demonstrates that many children―and some adults―will often accept mysterious disappearances and creations, perceiving them not as tricks or illusions but as actual occurrences. His analysis clearly shows that alongside our everyday belief in object permanence, we also have a set of quasi-magical beliefs that can be activated by appropriate situations and behaviors. The acceptability of these beliefs will vary from culture to culture, and will be widespread among preliterate peoples but less obvious in advanced industrial countries. The author, a Russian psychologist, draws on his own extensive research and examines other taken-for-granted concepts, such as the distinction between animate and inanimate.
Foundations of the Mind, amply illustrated with experimental material, has enormous implications for the study of both child development and the psychology of human beliefs. It attacks our complacent and often culturally biased faith in the nature of reality, and as such will become required reading for all psychologists.

Foundations of the Mind: Children's Understanding of Reality

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Harvard University Press

This text presents and analyzes children's judgements about fundamental metaphysical problems. In the first part of the book, dialogues with children are described which were constructed on the basis of Rene Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" and dealt with children's ideas about such topics as the relationships between true and false knowledge, sensual images and physical objects, mind and body, personal existence of the external world, existence of the Supreme Being, and dreams and reality.; The second part of the book draws upon concepts which children of various ages have about psychological and metapsychological aspects of human reality, such as cognitive and moral development of the child, personal freedom and responsibility, the relationships between conscious and unconscious, and alive and non-alive, fundamental drives of a human individual for development and expansion of his or her needs and passions, for eternal life, and for the dreamlike world of accomplished wishes.; The book presents a systematic empirical and theoretical developmental study of the problems, some of which were touched upon in Piaget's early writings, but later abandoned by Piaget and only sporadically illuminated by other authors, and some of which are new to developmental psychological research.; This book whould be of interest to developmental psychologists, teachers, educationalists, social workers, lawyers and other professionals interested in the knowledge that four- to 14-year-old children have about the most fundamental aspects of reality and human beings.

The Child as a Cartesian Thinker: Childrens' Reasonings About Metaphysical Aspects Of Reality

Eugene V. Subbotsky University of Lancaster

Mental Health

Psychology Press

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Books by Subbotsky Eugene V.