Classic Edition Sources

Chapter 1 The Grand Theories

Selection 1    26509 Sigmund Freud, from “The Development of the Sexual Function,” An Outline of Psychoanalysis
“It has been found that in early childhood there are signs of bodily activity to which only ancient prejudice could deny the name of sexual, and which are connected with mental phenomena that we come across later in adult love, such as fixation to a particular object, jealousy, and so on.”

Selection 2    26496 Jean Piaget, from “The Genetic Approach to the Psychology of Thought,” The Journal of Educational Psychology
“From a developmental point of view, the essential in the act of thinking is not contemplation—that is to say, that which the Greek called ‘theorema’—but the action of the dynamics.”


Selection 3    24525 Erik Erikson, from “Eight Stages of Man,” Childhood and Society
“What follows … is a list of ego qualities which emerge from critical periods of development—criteria (identity is one) by which the individual demonstrates that his ego, at a given stage, is strong enough to integrate the timetable of the organism with the structure of social institutions.”


Selection 4    45361 Lê Xuân Hy and Jane Loevinger, from “The Concept of Ego Development,” Measuring Ego Development
“Thus the search for coherent meanings in experience is the essence of the ego or ego functioning, rather than just one among many ego functions. The ego maintains its stability, its identity, and its coherence by selectively gating out observations inconsistent with its current state—granting that one person’s coherence is another person’s gibberish.”


Selection 5    21250 Lawrence Kohlberg, from “The Child as a Moral Philosopher,” Psychology Today
“How can one study morality? Current trends in the fields of ethics, linguistics, anthropology and cognitive psychology have suggested a new approach which seems to avoid the morass of semantical confusions, value-bias and cultural relativity in which the psychoanalytic and semantic approaches to morality have foundered.”


Selection 6    12449 Carol Gilligan, from “Woman’s Place in Man’s Life Cycle,” In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
“At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences. This discovery occurs when theories formerly considered to be sexually neutral in their scientific objectivity are found instead to reflect a consistent observational and evaluative bias.”



Selection 7    28025 Howard Gardner and Joseph Walters, from “A Rounded Version,” Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice
“[W]e believe that human cognitive competence is better described in terms of a set of abilities, talents or mental skills, which we call ‘intelligences.’ All normal individuals possess each of these skills to some extent; individuals differ in the degree of skill and in the nature of their combination. We believe this theory of intelligence may be more humane and more veridical than alternative views of intelligence and this more adequately reflects the data of human ‘intelligent’ behavior.”


Selection 8    29528 Martin E. P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” American Psychologist
“Entering a new millennium, Americans face a historical choice. Left alone on the pinnacle of economic and political leadership, the United States can continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of its people and those of the rest of the planet … At this juncture, the social and behavioral sciences can play an enormously important role.”



Selection 9    26498 William Wordsworth, from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” The Works of William Wordsworth
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream, / It is not now as it hath been of yore.”

Chapter 2 Non-Western Classics

Selection 10    26511 Ken Wilber, from “The Spectrum of Development,” Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development
“The basic structures of consciousness are, in effect, what is known as the Great Chain of Being. Some versions of the Great Chain give only two levels (matter and spirit)… Some are very sophisticated, giving literally dozens of the basic structures of the overall spectrum…. For this presentation, I have selected what seem to be the nine most central and functionally dominant structures.”


Selection 11    26512 Bahá΄u΄lláh, from The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys
“The stages that mark the wayfarer’s journey from the abode of dust to the heavenly homeland are said to be seven. Some have called these Seven Valleys, and others, Seven Cities. And they say that until the wayfarer taketh leave of self, and traverseth these stages, he shall never reach to the ocean of nearness and union, nor drink of the peerless wine.”


Selection 12    26513Kúng Fu-tzu (Confucius), from “The Great Learning,” A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy
“The Way of learning to be great (or adult education) consists in manifesting the clear character, loving the people, and abiding (chih) in the highest good.”




Selection 13    45363 Na’im Akbar, from “The Evolution of Human Psychology for African Americans,” Black Psychology
“There has been a rapid evolution in the thinking about the psychology of African Americans since 1970. That evolution has progressed from a self-negating perspective which viewed the model human being as necessarily non-Black to a self-affirmative perspective which sees the African as a model of universal man.”

Chapter 3 Genes and Environmental Influence

Selection 14    26499 Anne Anastasi, from “Heredity, Environment, and the Question ‘How?’,” Psychological Review
“The heredity-environment problem is still very much alive. Its viability is assured by the gradual replacement of the questions, ‘Which one?’ and ‘How much?’ by the more basic and appropriate question, ‘How?’ ”



Selection 15    26514 Alexander Thomas, Stella Chess, and Herbert G. Birch, from “The Origin of Personality,” Scientific American
“It is our hypothesis that the personality is shaped by the constant interplay of temperament and environment.”

Chapter 4 Development in Infancy

Selection 16    26515 Jean Piaget, from The Origins of Intelligence in Children
“Intelligence does not by any means appear at once derived from mental development, like a higher mechanism, and radically distinct from those which have preceded it. Intelligence presents, on the contrary, a remarkable continuity with the acquired of even inborn processes on which it depends and at the same time makes sense of.”


Selection 17    21245 Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, from “Infant–Mother Attachment,” American Psychologist
“Whether the context is feeding, close bodily contact, face-to-face interaction, or indeed the situation defined by the infant’s crying, mother-infant interaction provides the baby with opportunity to build up expectations of the mother and, eventually, a working model of her as more or less accessible and responsive.”

Chapter 5 Development in Early Childhood

Selection 18    45364 Jean Piaget, Bärbel Inhelder, and Edith Mayer, from The Co-ordination of Perspectives
“A pasteboard model … was made to represent three mountains. From his [sic] initial position in front of the model the child sees a green mountain occupying the foreground a little to his right.”


Selection 19    20809 L. S. Vygotsky, from The Genetic Roots of Thought and Speech
“[W]e considered several hypotheses, and we came to the conclusion that inner speech develops through a slow accumulation of functional and structural changes, that it branches off from the child’s external speech simultaneously with the differentiation of the social and the egocentric function of speech, and finally that the speech structure mastered by the child becomes the basic structures of his thinking.”


Selection 20    20822 Mildred B. Parten, from “Social Participation Among Pre-School Children,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
“[I]f a toy were placed in front of him, how would he not look at it. This type of [play] behavior was called unoccupied ... Closely related ... is the play in which the child observes a group of children playing, but he himself does not overtly enter into the play activity. He is an onlooker.”


Selection 21    24271 Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross, from “Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
“The results of the present study provide strong evidence that exposure to filmed aggression heightens aggressive reactions in children.”


Selection 22    21248 Diana Baumrind, from “Child Care Practices Anteceding Three Patterns of Preschool Behavior,” Genetic Psychology Monographs
“Parents of the most competent and mature boys and girls (Pattern I children) were notably firm, loving, demanding, and understanding. Parents of dysphoric and disaffiliative children (Pattern II children) were firm, punitive, and unaffectionate. Mothers of dependent, immature children (Pattern III children) lacked control and were moderately loving. Fathers of these children were ambivalent and lax.”

Chapter 6 Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Selection 23    26518 B. F. Skinner, from “Verbal Behavior,” About Behaviorism
“Relatively late in its history, the human species underwent a remarkable change: its vocal musculature came under operant control … Language was born, and with it many important characteristics of human behavior for which a host of mentalistic explanations have been invented.”


Selection 24    26519 Noam Chomsky, from “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language
“[T]he system that Skinner develops specifically for the description of verbal behavior … is based on the notions ‘stimulus’, ‘response’, and ‘reinforcement’… I think it is important to see in detail how far from the mark any analysis phrased solely in these terms must be and how completely this system fails to account for the facts of verbal behavior.”



Selection 25    45366 Jean Piaget, from Conservation of Continuous Quantities
“The results obtained seem to prove that continuous quantities are not at once considered to be constant, and that the notion of conservation is gradually constructed by means of an intellectual mechanism which it is our purpose to explain.”

Chapter 7 Social and Personality Development in Middle Childhood

Selection 26    26521 Robert L. Selman and Anne P. Selman, from “Children’s Ideas About Friendship: A New Theory,” Psychology Today
“We have found that the children’s understanding of friendship, like their understanding of justice, does develop in a relatively universal and orderly sequence of stages, each characterized by a distinct, formal structure of thought, which does parallel stages in their thinking about relationships with others in general. More specifically, we have identified five separate stages in their thinking about friendship.”


Selection 27    45367 Jean Piaget, from The Moral Judgment of the Child
“There would therefore seem to be two types of respect for rules corresponding to two types of social behaviour. This conclusion deserves to be closely examined, for if it holds good, it should be of the greatest value to the analysis of child morality.”


Selection 28    26500 Beatrice Blyth Whiting and Carolyn Pope Edwards, from “A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Sex Differences in the Behavior of Children Aged Three Through Eleven,” Journal of Social Psychology
“Our study suggests that … there are universal sex differences in the behavior of children 3–11 years of age, but the differences are not consistent nor as great as the studies of American and Western European children would suggest.”

Chapter 8 Physical and Cognitive Development in Adolescene

Selection 29    26501 Mary Cover Jones, from “Psychological Correlates of Somatic Development,” Developmental Psychology
“What has this study contributed to information or understanding concerning the psychological correlates of maturity status?... As a group, early maturing boys have assets that are valued by the peer culture … The boys whose pubescence came late cling to a little-boy type of activity which may be salutary in respect to impulse expression. It is accompanied by more tense and attention-getting behavior in the high-school years.”


Selection 30    45368 Jean Piaget, from “The Mental Development of the Child,” in Jean Piaget’s Six Psychological Studies, trans. Anita Tenzer
“At eleven or twelve years of age there is a fundamental transformation in the child’s thinking which marks the completion of the operations constructed during middle childhood. This is the transition from concrete to ‘formal’ thinking.”


Selection 31    45369 William G. Perry, Jr., from Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years
“If one construes knowledge and values as relativistic, one is therefore threatened with the possibility of humanly unbearable disorientation. Other than denying relativism itself, the ways of preventing this disaster would seem limited to three.”


Chapter 9 Social and Personality Development in Adolescence

Selection 32    24526 James E. Marcia, from “Development and Validation of Ego-Identity Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“[T]he main contribution of this study lies in the development, measurement, and partial validation of the identity statuses as individual styles of coping with the psychosocial task of forming an ego identity.”




Selection 33    26502 Michael L. Penn and Debra J. Witkin, from “Pathognomic Versus Developmentally Appropriate Self-Focus During Adolescence: Theoretical Concerns and Clinical Implications,” Psychotherapy
“Self-focused attention has been associated with a number of psychopathological and distress related conditions—including depression, alcohol abuse, suicide, eating disorders, anxiety, and loneliness. Ironically, however, increased self-focus is also regarded as a normative aspect of adolescent functioning.”


Chapter 10 Cognitive Development in Early and Middle Adulthood

Selection 34    45371 Mary Field Belenky et al., from Subjective Knowledge: The Quest for Self
“What follows a woman’s discovery of personal authority and truth is, of course, a blend of her own unique life circumstances and attributes. But as we listened to many stories, we began to hear how a newly acquired subjectivism led the woman into a new world, which she insisted on shaping and directing on her own. As a result, her relationships and self-concept began to change.”


Selection 35    26525 John L. Horn and Raymond B. Cattell, from “Age Differences in Primary Mental Ability Factors,” Journals of Gerontology
“[B]ecause of influences operating throughout development, intellectual processes come to be organized at a general level along two principal dimensions. These dimensions indicate two kinds of ability, each so broad and pervasive relative to other abilities and each so much involving performances commonly said to indicate intelligence that each is worthy of the name ‘intelligence’—hence the terms ‘fluid intelligence’ (Gf) and ‘crystallized intelligence’ (Gc).”


Selection 36    45372 Elena Mustakova-Possardt, from “Critical Consciousness: An Alternative Pathway for Positive Personal and Social Development,” Journal of Adult Development
“This paper presents a conceptual model of the integrative psychological construct of critical consciousness (CC), defined as a moral awareness which propels individuals to disembed from their cultural, social, and political environment, and engage in a responsible critical moral dialogue with it, making active efforts to construct their own place in social reality and to develop internal consistency in their ways of being.”

Chapter 11 Social and Personality Development in Early and Middle Adulthood

Selection 37    26526 Daniel J. Levinson, from “A Conception of Adult Development,” American Psychologist
“I conceive of the life cycle as a sequence of eras. Each era has its own biopsychosocial character, and each makes its distinctive contribution to the whole. There are major changes in the nature of our lives from one era to the next, and lesser, though still crucially important, changes within eras.”


Selection 38    26527 Abraham H. Maslow, from “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health,” Motivation and Personality
“For the purposes of this discussion, [self-actualization] may be loosely described as the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, and the like. Such people seem to be fulfilling themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing, reminding us of Nietzsche’s exhortation, ‘Become what thou art!’”


Selection 39    26528 Roger Gould, from “Adult Life Stages: Growth Toward Self-Tolerance,” Psychology Today
“A person does not possess the full range of his uniqueness after merely passing through adolescence, which is the last stage of mental development that many psychologists officially recognize. The process of formation continues through many stages of life that we are just beginning to recognize. I began the research reported here to take a new look at the complex process of change in adulthood.”



Selection 40    45373 William A. Barry, S. J., from “Christian Maturity Through Ignatian Spirituality,” Human Development
“… I think in terms of personal and interpersonal development as part of the formation of a person toward Christian maturity … [T]he process of making the full Spiritual Exercises [of St. Ignatius] can be likened to the development of a friendship, in this case, a friendship with God, and in particular with the Son of God.”

Chapter 12 Development During the Elder Years

Selection 41    26529 Paul B. Baltes and K. Warner Schaie, from “Aging and IQ: The Myth of the Twilight Years,” Psychology Today
“In our opinion, general intellectual decline in old age is largely a myth. During the past 10 years, we and our colleagues (particularly G.V. Labouvie and J.R. Nesselroade) have worked to gain a better understanding of intelligence in the aged. Our findings challenge the stereotyped view, and promote a more optimistic one. We have discovered that the old man’s boast, ‘I’m just as good as I ever was,” may be true after all.”


Selection 42    26530 James W. Fowler, from Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning
“Stage 6 is exceedingly rare. The persons best described by it have generated faith compositions in which their felt sense of an ultimate environment is inclusive of all being. They have become incarnators and actualizers of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community.”


Selection 43    26503 Erik Erikson, from “Reflections on the Last Stage—And the First,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
“I will attempt to restate and to reflect on an overall perspective of human development which promises to reveal some affinities between the end and the beginning.”



Selection 44    21268 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, from On Death and Dying
“Among the over two hundred dying patients we have interviewed, most reacted to the awareness of a terminal illness at first with the statement, ‘No, not me, it cannot be true.’ ”