Animism (psychology)
According to Jean Piaget and Hans Zulliger in psychology, animism describes the phenomenon in which people assume that inanimate things are alive and attribute human properties to them. Children represent this way of thinking in the so-called preoperational stage , which extends from the second to the seventh year of life. For Rolf Oerter , animism is a characteristic of childish egocentric thinking.
In Jean Piaget's developmental psychology , animism is an aspect of the development of intelligence from birth to first language acquisition. In his basic work, published in 1958, Piaget explains that the development of the logic of the child follows certain predetermined laws and processes. His theory of "genetic learning", the "structure-genetic" theory, deals with the explanation of the cognitive development of children. The focus is on a child's interaction with their environment.
Piaget's findings are based primarily on the observations of his own three children, in whom he found certain (thinking) errors depending on their age. He examined the structure of childlike logic on the basis of his own empirical observations of natural behavioral processes and developed an epistemological justification that establishes a connection between childlike thinking and its developmental phase. According to Piaget, every individual strives for a balance between assimilation and accommodation . Under Assimilation refers to the incorporation of new experiences or experiences in an existing scheme, while accommodation for the extension and adaptation of existing cognitive structures (ie, schemas) to a perceived situation means that can not be handled with the existing schemes.
For Hans Zulliger, animism belongs to the "infantile or prelogical thinking category". This also includes the "anthropomorphizing and magical way of thinking". The adult has to break away from his "abstract-theoretical" way of thinking in order to understand the essentials, the core of the child's game. How the infantile way of thinking expresses itself is described and analyzed impressively by Hans Zulliger in his epochal publication "Healing Powers in Childlike Play":
- "We see a child playing with a log. It has wrapped it in rags, it talks to it, it lets itself be told - through its own mouth - from the log what it wants, wants and thinks. It communicates, hands it food and drinking, put it in a cardboard box as a 'cradle' etc. And we say with a smile: 'The child takes the log for its doll - it fantasizes the piece of wood into a doll and plays with it - and this corresponds to the anthropomorphizing thinking in the manner of a child ! ' We are wrong. The log is not 'in place' of the doll, it is not even just 'the' doll: it is the child's child , and what it does with the log is much more than what we adults an ' "Play" means. The child playing with the log considers what we perceive as his "toy" to be a living child who takes care of it. Only when we have understood this can we empathize with the "playing" child and remember and understand that it weeps tears of bitterest sadness for its logs, can feel the highest joys and deepest heartache ".
Individual evidence
- ^ Adventure Psyche, p. 106; Amann, Wipplinger, published by Braumüller in 2008; Martin Püttschneider. The role of animism in conveying chemical facts: an intervention study at the teutolab at Bielefeld University . Cuvillier Verlag; 2005. ISBN 978-3-86537-545-2 . p. 18-.
- ↑ cf. Oerter 1980, p. 316 ff.
- ↑ J. Piaget, The growth of logical thinking from childhood to puberty, Klett Verlag (1958)
- ↑ Zulliger 1967, p. 14 f
literature
- Rolf Oerter: Developmental Psychology, Donauwörth 1980
- Hans Zulliger: Healing Powers in Childlike Play, Stuttgart 1967