Piaget and Kubler-Ross

Tue, Mar 10, 2009
Piaget's view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously
influential, particularly in educational theory. His particular
insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's
increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake
certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so.
His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has
undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original
investigators, his importance comes from his overall vision.

He proposed that children's thinking does not develop entirely
smoothly: instead, there are certain points at which it "takes off"
and moves into completely new areas and capabilities. He saw these
transitions as taking place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12
years. This has been taken to mean that before these ages children are
not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain
ways, and has been used as the basis for scheduling the school
curriculum.

Adaptation      What it says: adapting to the world through
assimilation and accommodation
Assimilation      The process by which a person takes material into
their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence
of their senses to make it fit.
Accommodation      The difference made to one's mind or concepts by
the process of assimilation.
Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have
one without the other.
Classification      The ability to group objects together on the basis
of common features.
Class Inclusion      The understanding, more advanced than simple
classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets
of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs.
There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals,
so the class of animals includes that of dogs)
Conservation      The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay
the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.

The ability to move away from one system of classification to another
one as appropriate.
Egocentrism      The belief that you are the centre of the universe
and everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see
the world as someone els e does and adapt to it. Not moral
"selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development.
Operation      The process of working something out in your head.
Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have
to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like
count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their
heads.
Schema (or scheme)      The representation in the mind of a set of
perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together.
Stage      A period in a child's development in which he or she is
capable of understanding some things but not others.
Background

For many years, people with terminal illnesses were an embarrassment
for doctors. Someone who could not be cured was evidence of the
doctors' fallibility, and as a result the doctors regularly shunned
the dying with the excuse that there was nothing more that could be
done (and that there was plenty of other demand on the doctors' time).

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was a doctor in Switzerland who railed against
this unkindness and spent a lot of time with dying people, both
comforting and studying them. She wrote a book, called 'On Death and
Dying' which included a cycle of emotional states that is often
referred to (but not exclusively called) the Grief Cycle.

In the ensuing years, it was noticed that this emotional cycle was not
exclusive just to the terminally ill, but also other people who were a
ffected by bad news, such as losing their jobs or otherwise being
negatively affected by change. The important factor is not that the
change is good or bad, but that they perceive it as a significantly
negative event.
The Grief Cycle

The Grief Cycle can be shown as in the chart below, indicating the
roller-coaster ride of activity and passivity as the person wriggles
and turns in their desperate efforts to avoid the change.

The initial state before the cycle is received is stable, at least in
terms of the subsequent reaction on hearing the bad news. Compared
with the ups and downs to come, even if there is some variation, this
is indeed a stable state.

And then, into the calm of this relative paradise, a bombshell bursts...
    Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
    Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
    Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
    Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
    Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
    Testing stage: Seeking realistic solution.

    Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.

Sticking and cycling
Getting stuck--
A common problem with the above cycle is that people get stuck in one
phase. Thus a person may become stuck in denial, never moving on from
the position of not accepting the inevitable future. When it happens,
they still keep on denying it, such as the person who has lost their
job still going into the city only to sit on a park bench all day.

Getting stuck in denial is common in 'cool' cultures (such as in
Britain, particularly Southern England) where expressing anger is not
acceptable. The person may feel that anger, but may then repress it,
bottling it up inside.

Likewise, a person may be stuck in permanent anger (which is itself a
form of flight from reality) or repeated bargaining. It is more
difficult to get stuck in active states than in passivity, and getting
stuck in depression is perhaps a more common ailment.
Going in cycles

Another trap is that when a person moves on to the next phase, they
have not completed an earlier phase and so move backwards in cyclic
loops that repeat previous emotion and actions. Thus, for example, a
person that finds bargaining not to be working, may go back into anger
or denial.

Cycling is itself a form of avoidance of the inevitable, and going
backwards in time may seem to be a way of extending the time before
the perceived bad thing happens.
See also

The positive change cycle, Coping Mechanisms, The need for control,
Psychoanalysis and mourning

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Macmillan, NY, 1969