Retrofitting Justification and Progressive Outlook: Commentary on David Elkind (2025)

David Elkind (2025) presents a fruit of his many years of thinking about bridging the theories of the two “most eminent psychologists” (Haggbloom et al., 2002) in the 20th century. He proposes a “cognitive development hierarchy of ego defenses.” It is a unique attempt to set twelve Freudian ego defenses on Piaget’s stages of cognitive development because, unlike Freud’s stages, Piaget’s stages constitute a hierarchical structure that not only lends a vehicle to carry ego defenses but also assigns cognitive developmental levels to them including Elkind’s own notions of adolescent egocentrism. For the first time, Freudian ego defenses are aligned with the hierarchical structure, which we may call the hierarchy model.Earlier papers in this journal have proposed ways to bring Freud and Piaget together. For example, the two theorists were deemed to see eye to eye on issues of symbolic formation (Furth, 1983); the two stage theories countered the rationality and centered thinking in the Western psychology that “staked great hope on modeling itself after natural sciences” (Youniss, 1995, p. 378); Piaget’s thinking about psychoanalysis evolved in his own intellectual development (Harris, 1997). Now, the hierarchy model zooms in on one part of each of the two grand theories: Freudian ego defenses and Piagetian egocentrism. It brings us a different way of merging the two divergent theories.It is worth noting that the hierarchy model distinguishes the two theorists’ focuses: species characteristics that “Piaget’s theory and research were aimed at discovering” (p. 1) as opposed to personality traits that Freudian ego defenses were created to depict even though hierarchy model does not mention that Freudian theory is also about the psychology of species development. The model’s goal was to coalesce these distinct features into one system of the cognitive development hierarchy of ego defenses.However, efforts to meld Freud’s and Piaget’s theory continue to present challenges to developmental scientists’ philosophical beliefs. As Elkind (2025) aptly points out, the dialectical nature of Piaget’s biological theory of knowledge does not go well with the mechanical quality of Freudian ego defense mechanisms because ego defenses do not become transformed with age or stage but are transmitted into the next stages as additional symbolic tools. Similarly, the notion of adolescent egocentrism does not fit well with the dialectical nature of Piaget’s theory. The concepts of sensorimotor intelligence (e.g., reorganization of schemas) and stage development (e.g., diminishing egocentrism with the development of socially organized thoughts) pivot on the concept of reconstruction from the early forms.This incompatibility appears to dissolve itself for Elkind when he had an epiphany after reading the young Piaget’s (1951) remark that preoperational egocentrism “is to replace the inexplicable ‘projection’ of the self into things by the idea of assimilation of the external world by the self, an assimilation which is undoubtedly continuous with the biological assimilation” (quoted in Elkind, 2025, p. 4). Note that Piaget borrowed Freud’s term “projection” but suggested that egocentrism was a continuous biological assimilation, a fledging theoretical point that differs from Freud. However, Elkind’s epiphany moves away from the dialectical theorization of egocentrism that Piaget was developing in the 1920s to retrofit a justification that Piaget aligned his egocentric definition with Freud’s “projection.” This underpinning idea of the hierarchy model evokes both conceptual and historical issues of Piaget’s and Freud’s theory.Conceptually, egocentrism is an important part of Piaget’s epistemology, an organic component of the large theoretical construction and an observable phenomenon in cognitive development. “[I]t entails a systematic decentration process which is a necessary condition of objectivity itself” (Piaget, 1976, p. 21). Thus, although matching evolving egocentrism with mechanically lingering ego defenses through stages offers great psychological utility, it also enhances the oversimplified categorical version of Piaget’s work by stages. This matching act loses the indispensability of dialectical continuity in Piaget’s developmental epistemology that his psychology serves. At the same time, the mapping of ego defenses on to the cognitive development stages relies on the ontological features of ego defenses that Freud’s psychology carries (Ver Eecke, 2004).A systematic decentration in egocentrism, that is, developing decentered thoughts about people and things through experiences, is a process of cognitive transformation in egocentrism. The earlier decentrations will set a context in which later decentration will reconstruct the earlier ones into the current one. If we follow Piaget’s point, it is necessary to work further on the cognitive developmental hierarchy of ego defenses to explain (1) how the mechanical ego defenses can evolve along the changing cognitive development, and (2) whether egocentrism in childhood is indeed an explanatory dimension for each ego defense mechanism. Piaget (1976) explains the difference between his own stages and Freud’s in a clear language:Here, Piaget disagrees with Freud in that his dialectical constructivism presupposes the transformative continuity and freedom from preformation in forming cognitive structures through stages while Freud’s stages are more arbitrary categories than continuous change and reconstruction. Although it is Freudian stages like oral and anal that are in consideration, it is reasonable to say that ego defenses also express this arbitrary or categorical nature of preformation, the inborn characteristic and structure. Piaget himself sees contradictions across such categorical concepts instead of their living connections and changes.Historically, evidence suggests that Piaget shifted his view of psychoanalysis to articulate his own constructivist position in the mid-1920s. Biographical research (Bennour and Vonèche, 2009; Smith, 2002; Vidal, 1994) shows that his articulation has a root in his youthful revelation from reading Henri Bergson (1913) and writing his novel (Piaget, 1918). Early on, he studied psychoanalysis in Zurich and in Paris, making forays into child psychoanalysis, before he first empirically studied children’s thinking in Binet-Simon’s laboratory. In Geneva, as a new director of studies, he believed that egocentric thinking was a form that presented itself in both children and adults, as the hierarchy model suggests today (Bringuier, 1980; Harris, 1997; Vidal, 1994, 2001; Vonèche, 2001; also see Piaget’s various autobiographies in Kitchener, 2024). At the time, Piaget even cited a psychoanalyst’s observations of children’s beliefs about the origins of babies (Vidal, 2001). But around the mid-1920s, he had learned so much from his own studies of children that he decided to part ways with psychoanalysis (Piaget in Bringuier 1980). Later, Piaget offers his critique that “the future of psychoanalysis will be the day it becomes experimental” (Piaget in Evans, 1973, p. 4). There is reason to believe that, in his early career years in Geneva, Piaget’s personal interest in learning and applying psychoanalysis had a strong momentum. However, the empirical evidence from his studies of children compelled him to reject his early belief from psychoanalysis that the egocentric thinking seen in childhood can also appear in adulthood without first going through a transition to socialized, logical thinking (Harris, 1997).Conceptually and historically, we have seen some persistent incompatibility between Piaget’s and Freud’s stage theory. Theories aside, does the hierarchy model afford some practical usefulness? An interesting place to consider is education. First, in higher education, characterizing Piaget’s work as a stage development theory is the hallmark of introductory developmental psychology textbooks and other popular sources. This characterization is an efficient way to present Piaget’s theory on its large trajectory, and Freud’s too for that matter, to future generations of developmentally minded students in developmental psychology, psychotherapy, and education.For example, although not Elkind’s intent, the hierarchy model has implications for how we teach our students. It presents Piaget’s theory of cognitive development while extending Elkind’s (1967) well-known concepts of adolescent egocentrism, both of which are presented in introductory college textbooks. The model offers a way for students to examine the early childhood egocentrism Piaget depicts and the adolescent egocentrism Elkind advances within a unified framework as, if accepted, a useful linkage in a human development textbook.However, this usefulness also passes on to next generation a dominant tradition of the 20th century, one that resorts to reductionism for studying complex experiences of human development. It can reinforce learners’ categorical thinking, typically a stage being a category. The traditional way of parsing Piaget’s stages to organize curriculum and to guide pedagogy has inevitably left teachers feeling dejected – “either we’re too early and [children] can’t learn it, or we’re too late and they know it already” (Duckworth, 2006, p. 31). This dilemma in applying Piaget’s ideas to education often arises from placing children into the stage categories, which is not uncommon in colleges. If researchers trained in this educational tradition are familiar with the hierarchy model for identifying ego defenses on different cognitive stages, their familiarity can be conducive to designing “scales for each level of development” (Elkind, 2025, p. 9). This psychological research approach differs from Piaget’s own view and practice.When Flavell (1963) first comprehensively introduced Piaget to American psychologists, Piaget commented on the difference between him and Flavell: “it could be argued that the differences between us stem from the fact that his approach is perhaps too exclusively psychological and insufficiently epistemological while the converse is true for me” (p. iv). This comment serves as a backdrop for us to evaluate the hierarchy model in a similar vein. It focuses more on psychological approach and less on developmental epistemology. Piaget’s 1962 comment suggests a contemporary awkwardness in mapping Freudian ego defenses onto his cognitive development stages.This consideration is closely linked to a complex assumption that “a species characteristic can become a personality trait if it can be measured or individually identified” (Elkind, 2025, p. 2). This assumption goes well with the psychological research approach above. For one thing, it depends on scales with quantifiable categories, and for another, it is embedded in researchers’ tendency to believe that the broad generalizability of psychology can draw on limited psychological traits observed in Western societies like the USA (Arnette, 2008).To be sure, the hierarchy model does not explicitly emphasize the tendency to overgeneralize with limited observations. But the inference from species characteristic to personality trait in psychology underlies the model. This inferential reasoning has long dissatisfied social scientists who want to study people that are tied meaningfully to humanities and social living. They began looking for alternatives to the dominant psychological approach. Many alternatives turned to cultures and diverse sociohistorical contexts (Youniss, 1995). One outstanding alternative related to personality traits was the movement of culture and personality studies in the mid-20th century. “Contemporary investigators of culture and personality can hardly ignore the fact that such research was once considered an exciting frontier in the social and behavioral sciences” (LeVine 2001, p. 804, emphasis added; for a historian’s account, see Bryson, 2009).This culture and personality study movement arose in the USA against an optimistic evolutionary view of the 19th century. The view promoted the idea that nations and peoples develop along one inevitable stage-like pathway, single and linear. Commonly known examples include Marx and Engles (1965) analysis of societal development for nations, Freud’s (2017) insights into the psychosexual development of individuals, and Vygotsky’s human sociocultural-intellectual development based on the Marxist societal development theory (Van der Veer et al., 1994; Vygotsky, 1986). Parallel to the rise and spread of these theories, a group of US social anthropologists including Franz Boas and his students Ruth Benedict, Margret Mead, and Edward Sapir, among others, laid the research foundation for culture and personality studies during the interwar period.Robert LeVine (2001), a well-placed cultural and psychological anthropologist, observes that the early major contributors to culture and personality studies were acquainted with Freudian ideas while developing their own formulations, but “None of these developments was even remotely acceptable to the Freudians” (p. 811). In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of interdisciplinary-minded social scientists began articulating the connections between culture and personality. Kluckhohn and Murray (1948) redefined the name of the movement to “culture in personality and personality in culture” (p. 44, original emphasis) to align the movement’s orientation with the scientific insights of the time.In fact, social scientists in this movement held diverse scientific beliefs and approaches. They rallied around the banner of culture and personality but never were unified to form a new discipline. Unfortunately, the movement declined in the 1950s and largely diminished from the scene by 1960. Although there is not sufficient historical research to uncover the causes of the decline, LeVine (2001) identifies one of the obvious reasons for which such studies were abandoned. That is, the movement was “susceptible to crude psychological reductionism and overgeneralization” (p. 814). He believes that psychology and anthropology drifted away from each other in the second part of the 20th century. Only a small group of psychological anthropologists survived and continued reorganizing this movement.Today, psychological anthropology is having a strong comeback. Twenty-four years after LeVine’s (2001) reflection on the movement, we have seen surges of cultural and cross-cultural studies that adopt Kluckhohn and Murray’s articulation: culture in personality and personality in culture. It has become a widely recognized worldview further advanced by Rogoff (2003) and a wide range of like-minded researchers in the past few decades. Let us call it an integration worldview. This steadily growing worldview significantly modifies the established theories of stage development by foregrounding culture, not the species characteristic, in shaping personality. Therefore, human developmental pathways are likely to be multiple and diverse as experienced in real life, entwining personality and culture change through people’s participation in cultural practices. This view helps contextualize the observable personality change in interaction with societal and cultural change, which can be meaningful not only to researchers but also to research participants in various cultures. There is reason to believe that the stage development theories will gradually give way to reemerging and newly refined concepts and theories that return the integration worldview to the center of discourse about how personality develops in cultural contexts.It may be argued that culture and personality studies started on a wrong foot because at least one group of the movement, as represented by Benedict, Mead, and Sapir, upheld a cultural relativism that will never lead to a science that pursues a broad explanation of human behaviors. These scientists could not see the forest for the trees. In support of this argument, it is important to have stage developmental theories that can set researchers’ eyes on the species-wide behaviors while focusing on personality. However, recent scholarships and empirical research continue to call our attention to a long-neglected understanding. That is, without sufficient, accurate, dynamic knowledge of how culture and personality shape each other, our views of the relations between species characteristics and personality have few options but to rely on reductionism and overgeneralization in the name of science. This is a point that Arnett (2008) persuasively presents after documenting that publications in American Psychological Association journals neglected 95% of the world’s population, not to say examining the mutual embeddedness and integrated relations between culture and personality in different peoples’ own contexts and community practices.In conclusion, the hierarchy model retrofits a justification for unifying the notions of ego defenses and egocentrism by relying on young Piaget’s transitional borrowing of Freud’s concepts. The model adheres to the staple account of stage development in college textbooks and offers a useful way to expand the existing stage development discourse. In the hierarchy model, a universality assumption underlying the stage development also stands out regarding the conceived relations between the species characteristics and personality. The review of Piaget’s own evolving ideas and the movement of culture and personality studies during the last century suggests a progressive outlook that represents waves of efforts in social sciences to redefine and reconceptualize culture-personality relations. This outlook in social sciences, including developmental psychology, has progressively demarcated itself from the hierarchy model. The core ideas that inspired culture and personality studies have become a widely recognized paradigm shift. In these evolving contexts, Elkind’s contribution provides a good service to our thinking about linking the past to the future.The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.This study did not receive any external funding.Yeh Hsueh was solely responsible for conceptualizing, preparing, and writing this article.