The Beginning Years (1880–1914) 207ended abruptly as the result of a personal scandal. In 1908, he
was forced to resign from Johns Hopkins after being caught
in a raid on a house of prostitution. He spent the rest of his
career in Mexico and Europe, where he continued to write
about development as well as world peace. A second reason
for his limited influence was his failure to develop empirical
paradigms to test his ideas. As is always the case in science,
theory without a clear way of evaluating the underlying no-
tion is of limited value to the field. In spite of his lack of data,
his ideas are remarkably modern. It is now recognized that
“Baldwin stands alongside William James as one of the pri-
mary intellectual forces involved in the founding of American
psychology as a science” (Cairns, 1994, p. 129).
At the time, however, it was Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
who influenced American developmental psychology. Freud
offered both a theory of development based on psychosexual
stages and a method of study, psychoanalysis (Freud, 1900,
1905, 1910). Freud taught at the University of Vienna but de-
voted himself largely to clinical work with neurotic patients
and to a prolific writing career. In spite of the fact that he did
not treat children, he developed a theory of early development
based on the recollections of childhood by his adult clients. In
many ways, Freud set the agenda for the next 50 years of de-
velopmental psychology by defining content domains (ag-
gression, sex roles, morality) and articulating central themes
(the importance of early experience, the formative impact of
early family relationships for later developmental outcomes).
Alfred Binet (1857–1911) was the most underappreciated
figure of this era (Siegler, 1992). Despite his lack of formal
training in psychology, Binet was a prolific contributor with
over 200 books, articles, and reviews on a wide range of psy-
chological subjects to his credit. Binet is, of course, best
known for his contributions to the assessment of intelligence
(Binet & Simon, 1905), but he was much more than the father
of IQ testing. He anticipated a number of Piaget’s views,
for example, that cognitive development is a constructive
process, that its purpose is adaptation to the physical and
social worlds, that children assimilate new experiences to
existing ways of thinking, and that intelligence pervades all
activities. Moreover, he made major contributions to various
areas of memory, particularly suggestibility and eyewitness
testimony, children’s memory for prose, and the role of
memory in mental calculation expertise (Binet, 1894, 1900).
Binet designed and conducted a variety of memory experi-
ments. At the same time, he recognized the need to apply
convergent methodological approaches to solve psychologi-
cal problems. “Our psychology is not yet so advanced that
we can limit our analyses to information attained in the
laboratory” (Binet, quoted in Cairns, 1983). It is interesting
that Binet’s demonstrations of the feasibility of an experi-
mentally based science of child development predated
Watson’s more famous experiments on conditioning of emo-
tion by nearly 20 years. “Binet was the first to provide con-
vincing evidence for the proposition that a science of human
development was possible” (Cairns, 1983, p. 51). For a vari-
ety of reasons—primarily, perhaps, his lack of a university
position—Binet’s contributions were largely forgotten until
recently (Cairns, 1983; Siegler, 1992).Characteristics of the Early TheoriesTheories of development may be characterized, most cen-
trally, by whether they posit that development is the conse-
quence of internal (nature) or external (nurture) forces.
Overton and Reese (1973) describe this dichotomy asorgan-
ismicversusmechanistic. The organismic view is character-
ized by a focus on biological or endogenous accounts of
development. It has as its basic metaphor “the organism,
the living, organized system presented to experience in mul-
tiple forms....Inthis representation, the whole is organic
rather than mechanical in nature” (Reese & Overton, 1970,
pp. 132–133). The mechanistic view is characterized by a
focus on environmental mechanisms, and development is
seen as essentially an externally controlled or driven process.
The machine is often used as the metaphor for this develop-
mental model of development. In the early era, Baldwin,
Freud, Hall, and Binet all endorsed an organismic approach.
As Cairns noted of Baldwin: “His aim was to outline ‘a sys-
tem of genetic psychology’ that would attempt to achieve a
synthesis of the current biological theory of organic adapta-
tion with the doctrine of the infant’s development” (Baldwin,
1895, p. vii, cited by Cairns, 1983, p. 54).
Another way in which theories of development can be
described is in terms of their breadth. The scope of the early
theories was notably broad. Not only did they include emo-
tions and cognitions, sex and sensation, but a century ago, the-
orists in the grand tradition assumed that large portions of
the developmental landscape could be accounted for in terms
of a limited number of general, universal principles. They
were not unaware of cross-cultural variation, but they viewed
other cultures as living laboratories that could provide oppor-
tunities to evaluate the operation of fundamental laws of de-
velopment. Freud’s use of anthropological data inTotem &
Taboo(Freud, 1918) was an attempt to describe unconscious
motivation in other cultures. This was a prime example of our
ancestors’ eagerness to seek confirmation of their theories in
other cultures. Their understanding of those cultures, how-
ever, was quite limited.