From Button Machines to Piaget Posted on April 14, 2008 David Elkind (bio) describes his early career path.

My parents were not well educated. They were immigrants, and I was the youngest in the family. And none of my sisters or brothers had beyond high school, so I was working for a clothing manufacturer and doing the cutting and working the button machines and so on. But I got some friends in high school, and they were all going on to college. And I thought maybe I would do that, and I got in to UCLA.

At that time it was only $50.00 a semester, and I took apparel merchandising because I thought that would be my career. But I didn’t do very well in the courses, but I did take a beginning psychology course with Richard Centers, a sociology course, I still remember, and really just became fascinated. And after I decided I couldn’t be in apparel merchandise, I did switch my major to psychology and did very well. And I still didn’t really know what I wanted in college, or what a Ph.D. was, frankly, and I got my B.A. in psychology, and people told me, “You know you can’t do anything with this.” Now you tell me, after four years, and they encouraged me to go on for a Ph.D.

Fortunately at that time, the VA had a program for training clinical psychologists in which they not only trained you, but paid you a stipend. And that was ready made for me because I didn’t have any money, so I got in the VA training program. But that created a kind of schizophrenia because the department that I was in was a very heavily experimental program, with Seward and Gengerelli and so on, very experimental learning theory types, and who were very opposed to clinical work, and at the same time, they were very good clinicians, like Bruno Klopfer, who was Mr. Rorschach.

So I had this conflict, and there was a great deal of conflict between the two divisions because there was very little respect for clinical work at that time.

When I had to do my dissertation, everybody was doing Rorschach studies, but it didn’t seem scientific to me. So I did a learning study with rats, but I tried to combine Hull’s theory with Freud’s theory. And so I tried to combine those two throughout my career actually because those are two conflicting sort of approaches, and then I was going to work for a VA hospital around Los Angeles when a lot of my teachers, I was very fortunate in having great teachers, encouraged me to apply for a research assistant position with David Rappaport at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass. David Rappaport was a renowned Freudian scholar, and so I went out; Austen Riggs is a residential treatment center for adolescents, a very famous place.

Erik Erikson was there, and he accepted me. And I was very pleased about that, and I went back home. And I expected him to be sending me a lot of books on Freud, but instead he sent me a lot of books on someone I’d heard about very vaguely in my courses, this Jean Piaget guy. And so I started reading and I knew very little about it, but Rappaport was very much interested in Piaget at the time. And so when I went there, I started reading Piaget with him, and he taught me really how to read. I had never read -- we’d spend a whole hour on a single page, and because of my scientific bent, I decided that, I looked at Piaget’s research and thought, “Well, he doesn't do any quantifications. I’ll just do it scientifically and show him that you can't, that this is all wrong.”

So I just replicated one of his number studies, but what I did was assign numbers to children’s responses so that I could quantify it, and I replicated with children at different age levels, just exactly using the techniques, the pennies, six pennies and so on. And lo and behold, I found there were significant differences between the age groups. And also just in talking with the children, it was very, very clear to me that this was a legitimate phenomenon. And so suddenly I found that here was a way to combine my clinical interests with my research interests that Piaget was dealing with what in clinical work, I liked, which was important content, and he was dealing with causality, and space, and time, which was important content, areas.

So I began replicating his experiments, and publishing them and helped to, I think, bring Piaget into being recognized in this country.

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