Engl121 Week 5 Assignment

ENGL121

Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget are both well-known theorists. Piaget has four stages of developmental theories while Freud has come up with five stages. Freud was a Viennese doctor whom came up with the first known theory. He believed that the way parents deal with the basic sexual and aggressive desires of their children would tell how their personalities developed and how they would be as adults. These two theorists both have different perspectives on the stages of development in children.

Piaget has a theory of cognitive development which breaks down into four stages; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal. He was a Swiss biologist and psychologist who watched his old children and how they made sense of their surrounding world. By watching and studying the children is how he was able to come up with his four theories. He thought that all children went through these four stages in the same chorological order.

The first stage is the sensorimotor stage which is from birth until the age of two. This is where the infant gets an understanding of themselves as well as how things work in their environments. The child can tell other objects from itself. They learn by organizing this information and settling it into their brains.

The preoperational stage is after the sensorimotor stage and lasts until the age of four. The child is yet able to figure out what things are and what they are used for. Things have simple meanings at this time. The features are more recognized at this time.

The next change Piaget says these children experience is the concrete operations stage. This is from the ages of seven until eleven. The child starts to think abstractly and begins to create logical structures that will explain their physical experiences.

The last stage is the formal operations theory. This begins as the concrete stage ends and will last until around the age of fifteen. This stage is where...