In the wake of Jean Piaget’s work on children’s understanding of reality, it is generally accepted that by age two, children assume that an object hidden in a box will remain there unchanged until someone tampers with it. Eugene Subbotsky persuasively demonstrates that many children—and some adults—will often accept mysterious disappearances and creations, perceiving them not as tricks or illusions but as actual occurrences. His analysis clearly shows that alongside our everyday belief in object permanence, we also have a set of quasi-magical beliefs that can be activated by appropriate situations and behaviors. The acceptability of these beliefs will vary from culture to culture, and will be widespread among preliterate peoples but less obvious in advanced industrial countries. The author, a Russian psychologist, draws on his own extensive research and examines other taken-for-granted concepts, such as the distinction between animate and inanimate.

Foundations of the Mind, amply illustrated with experimental material, has enormous implications for the study of both child development and the psychology of human beliefs. It attacks our complacent and often culturally biased faith in the nature of reality, and as such will become required reading for all psychologists.

The great Swiss psychologist and theorist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) had much to say about the developing mind. He also had plenty to say about his own development, much of it, as Fernando Vidal shows, plainly inaccurate. In the first truly historical biography of Piaget, Vidal tells the story of the psychologist’s intellectual and personal development up to 1918. By exploring the philosophical, religious, political, and social influences on the psychologist’s early life, Vidal alters our basic assumptions about the origins of Piaget’s thinking and his later psychology.

The resulting profile is strikingly dissimilar to Piaget’s own retrospective version. In Piaget’s own account, as an adolescent he was a precocious scientist dedicated to questions of epistemology. Here we find him also—and increasingly—concerned with the foundations of religious faith and knowledge, immersed in social and political matters, and actively involved in Christian and socialist groups. Far from being devoted solely to the classification of mollusks, the young Piaget was a vocal champion of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of creative evolution, an interest that figured much more prominently in his later thinking than did his early work in natural history. We see him during World War I chastising conservatism and nationalism, espousing equality and women’s rights, and advocating the role of youth in the birth of a new Christianity.

In his detailed account of Jean Piaget’s childhood and adolescence—enriched by the intellectual and cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century Neuchâtel—Vidal reveals a little-known Piaget, a youth whose struggle to reconcile science and faith adds a new dimension to our understanding of the great psychologist’s life, thought, and work.