• It is self-centred in relation to having central reference to the child as an observer.
• It is subject to distortion because of the child's needs or feelings.
• Perception is closely tied to action or doing.
• Perception is unsteady in terms of the young child's unsteadiness of concentration.
Bruner and Piaget disagreed about the role of iconic representation in a child's thinking. In Bruner's theory the role of iconic knowledge is crucial to the explanation of conservation or the ability to understand that the physical attributes of objects (for example, mass) do not vary when the object's shape is changed.
Bruner's third stage of knowing, symbolic representation, refers to the ability to represent our experience of the world by using symbols. Bruner writes (1966: 31): 'The idea that there is a name that goes with things and that the name is arbitrary is generally taken as the essence of symbolism'.
Thus, a written sentence describing a beautiful landscape does not look like a landscape, whereas a picture of a landscape looks like a landscape.
The landscape is symbolized in the language describing it. In Bruner's (1966) theory, symbolic representation is enhanced through language acquisition in particular. Without the ability to symbolize, the child will grow into adulthood dependent upon the enactive and iconic modes of representing and organizing knowledge of the world.
Bruner's writing could be considered as not receiving the attention it deserves in the mainstream developmental psychology and educational psychology fields. Nonetheless his research and writing have important implications for psychologists' understanding of the developing child. By emphasizing the constructive nature of cognitive development and the influence of cultural factors, Bruner has added a richer dimension to our contemporary understanding of the nature of children's thinking.
Bateson contributed a number of significant concepts to contemporary systems thinking, including ideas about levels of communication and 'pat- terns that connect'. Bateson maintained that communication can occur across different levels: 'unhealthy' communication may contain 'double messages', which confuse one of the communicators regarding just what is being conveyed. Also, with a consuming interest in biology as well as human behaviour, Bateson was interested in 'patterns that connect'. As he wrote in Mind and Nature (1979: 16-17):
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the backward schizophrenic in another?
In the same book, Bateson went on to describe the patterns that connect as metapatterns - patterns of patterns. In this regard Bateson's thinking high- lights the organicist concept of structural interdependence in development, as described in Chapter 3.
Another significant contributor to the development of systems thinking was the 1997 Nobel Prize-winning Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine. His research into dissipative structures arising out of the non-linear processes in non-equilibrium systems provided a comprehensive theory of change (see Chapter 1 regarding the nature of development as 'change'). The the- ory incorporates some key concepts, as outlined below.
• Systems and subsystems. All systems are composed of subsystems, which are in a continual state of fluctuation or change. At any one time the fluctuation may be so strong as to shatter the pre-existing order.
• Chaos and order. At any 'singular moment' or 'bifurcation' the system may descend into 'chaos' or transcend to a higher level of organization or 'order' known as a 'dissipative structure'. Such structures are called 'dissipative' because they require more energy to sustain them than the previous structures.
• Equilibrium. In Newtonian thermodynamics all systems run down to disorder with energy dissipating over time. In the natural world there are 'closed systems' that do operate like machines. However, many systems are 'open', exchanging energy, matter or information with the environment.
While systems thinking, with its notions of self-organization, has clear connections with the organismic metaphor described by Pepper (1942), its novel emphasis on holism and non-linear causality suggests that it should be considered a new developmental metaphor in itself. In a developmental psychology context there is a growing interest in the application of systems theory to the study of children and the family (Kaye, 1985; Scarr, 1985;
Tolan, 1990;Wachtel, 1990). For example, a number of developmentalists, including Sameroff (1982), recognized the implications of Prigonine's theorizing: 'Adoption of such a systems model, with its assumptions of wholeness, self-stabilization, self-organization, and hierarchical organiza- tion, has implications for every aspect of developmental psychology' (Thelen and Smith, 1998: 575). To illustrate this point Thelen and Smith cite the need for development to be contextualized because the concept of 'open systems' necessitates an interchange between the organism and the environment. Ideas of non-linearity may be used to explain how apparently small transformations result in significant changes in the organism.
In the fifth edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology., edited by Damon and Lerner (1998), Lerner (1998: 1) notes that the current focus in theoretical development is 'a burgeoning interest not in structure, func- tion, or content per se, but in change, in the process through which change occurs, and thus in the means through which structures transform and functions evolve over the course of human life'. In many ways this under- standing captures significant features of a new developmental theory - dynamic systems theory.
Dynamic systems theory draws on the insights provided by systems thinking in the physical, biological and psychological sciences. It draws upon principles related to the global properties of complex systems (Thelen and Smith, 1994):
The new science that can extract common principles in the behav- iour of chemical reactions, clouds, forests, and embryos is variously called the study of dynamic, synergetic, dissipative, nonlinear, self- organizing, or chaotic theories. (We adopt here dynamic systems as the descriptor to emphasize that these are systems that change continuously over time.)
(Thelen and Smith, 1994: 50) Increasingly, dynamic systems theory is being applied to various areas of developmental psychology (Pepler and Craig and O'Connell, 2000; Slee, 2001; Thelen and Smith, 1984; Thelen and Smith, 1994) (Box 4.2). We will discuss it further in Chapter 11, in considering recent moves towards more integrative theories of child development.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have continued to examine theories based upon the organismic metaphor. One of the significant features of developmental psy- chology is the richness of its theoretical development. Presently, new and exciting breakthroughs are occurring in this theorizing and in this chapter we have attempted to capture some of the vibrancy of the current debate in relation to organicism. Generally, the organismic worldview (Pepper, 1942)
Box 4.2 The application of systems thinking to school bullying
In terms of the view that 'Bullying is collective in its nature, based on social relationships in the group' (Sutton and Smith, 1999: 97) one can apply many of the principles of systemic thinking described in this chapter. Thus, it can be argued that an identified problem such as bullying is not located solely within a particular individual.
Conventional western mechanistic ways of thinking, with a strong causal component, direct us to search for the faulty or broken part or problematic individual in order to fix or cure the 'problem'. Much is known about how such a mechanistic person-centred approach works. Schools are, however, also based around systems, and systems within systems (e.g. community, home, school, year level, classroom and peer groups). The various systems interact with each other, and within the systems individuals are viewed as active agents in con- struing their own world. From a systemic perspective, people are viewed in terms of their relationships with one another, rather than simply being understood principally on the basis of their individual development. A child's misconduct in school (e.g. bullying others) is understood to serve some purpose within the system or reflects something about the system itself. The behaviour is not just the result of some inner psychic disturbance or carried out for some reward.
The student's behaviour is, in a sense, a window through which we can look to understand his or her place in the system, and provides an important insight into the various roles and relationships within the system (Slee, 2002).
highlights the directional movement of the organism towards ever- increasing integration against the backdrop of a dynamic, evolving context.
All phenomena are interdependent. In this situation the child is an active constructor of reality and not merely responding passively. As an active individual, the child constructs interpretations of environmental events, and continually acts and interacts with his or her environment in order to construct and reconstruct experience. The child is viewed as a spon- taneously active organism, and because some activities are not simply a response to external events it is not theoretically possible to predict all of an individual's behaviour. Acting like lay theorists, children are continually adapting their theories to fit ever-changing events in their world, altering the world in the process. However, the lay theories are by no means as neat and consistent as we might like to imagine (Basseches, 1989) and it is the very inconsistencies in children's theorizing that force them to act to resolve them.
While this approach takes into account the uniqueness of the individual and the active participation of the individual in his or her own develop- ment, two key limitations to organismic theories must be observed. One relates to the structural stage conceptions of development, which 'fail to reflect the complexity and diversity of individuals' meaning making' (Basseches, 1989: 189). The second limitation associated with this approach includes a lack of explanation of how internal regulation, organ- ization and self-organization relate to the developmental process.
the Freudian legacy
Introduction
Freudian theory is something about which beginning psychology students often expect to hear a great deal, given the great impact it has had on west- ern psychology and its popular image. However, they may find Freud's work given only a minor place in psychology curricula that emphasize the scientific method and evidence-based psychology practice. Freud's ideas were indeed developed in the absence of scientific support, during the first part of the twentieth century. Despite - and possibly because of- this lack of scientific support, Freud's concepts had a great influence upon social science and the practice of psychiatry at the time. Freud may have tapped into ongoing desires to study subjective experience, which was being rejected by psychologists at the time as being inappropriate for scientific study (Fisher and Greenberg, 1996). More recently, too, Freudian ideas have been said to have 'penetrated into the matrix of modern psychology and continue to exert formidable influence' (Fisher and Greenberg, 1996: 6-7).
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say today that Freud's psycho- sexual theory of child development, derived from his reflections on the early childhood recollections of his adult psychiatric patients, has to be seriously questioned. Nevertheless, empirical support has been found for some aspects of Freudian theory, and his thinking was inspirational to others who have in turn greatly influenced our understanding of children's development, especially in infancy. Such workers include Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson, John Bowlby, Rene Spitz, Mary Ainsworth and Michael Rutter. They were in no way Freud's disciples, but reflected upon certain of his key insights and developed them in their own ways. In this chapter, we provide a brief reminder of Freud's Oedipal theory of child develop- ment, examine the scientific evidence for it and describe some of the later work in child development theory that built upon the Freudian tradition.