Each of the three great schools of developmental psy- chology
represented in this vo1ume--psychoana1ytic, cogni- tive-developmental,
and Vygotskian--diverges in important ways. But more recent changes in
each discipline have led to new possibilities for theoretical
integrations. Each ori- entation has begun to focus upon the problem of
"meaning construction", that is, how a person's subjectivity and con-
sciousness is created through his interaction with signifi- cant others.
Each discipline also discovered that as it switched to meaning and
interpretation as the foci of their work, they had to reformulate and,
in some cases, reject po- sitions taken by their founding figures. The
papers in this volume attempt to describe the newest developments in
each of these fields and to foster a theoretical dialogue around the
concept of the self. The papers in this book emerged out of discussions
at a Conference on the Self, sponsored by the Center for Psychosocial
Studies in Chicago. For the psychoanalytic and cognitive-developmental
ap- proaches, we can observe a transition from what we call the
bio10gism of both traditional Freudian and Piagetian memta- psychologies
to a more "communicative-interactionist" point of view. Psychoanalysts
have focused on the subjective expe- rience of their patients as
constituting a reality in its own right, and therefore have always
focused upon problems of communication and interpretation. But Freud's
emphasis on bio-sexua1 development led him to create a metapsycho1ogy in
which the basic organizing principle is that of drive re- duction.
