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Piaget's Cognitive Theory Of Cognition In Social Work And Psychology

Decent Essays

In psychoanalytic thought, conscious thinking is a product of the drives from which our emotions also spring. By nature, we are pleasure seekers and feelers, not thinkers. Thoughts are our personal means of deciding how to gratify our own drives. Defense mechanisms are a result from our need to indirectly manage drives when we become frustrated and negotiate acceptable behaviours with others. The need to manage our drives allows our unconscious mental process to develop. We need to explore all our thoughts and feelings to understand our essential drives.
Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory is one the most influential theory of cognition in social work and psychology. In his cognitive theory, our capacity for reasoning develops in stages, from infancy through adolescence and early adulthood. Piaget used four different stages; sensorimotor state, preoperational stage, concrete operations stage and formal operations stage. According to Hutchison, Piaget saw these four stages as sequential and interdependent, evolving from activity without thought, to thought with less emphasis on activity- from doing, to doing knowingly, and finally to conceptualizing.
A central concept in Piaget’s theory is that of the schema. It is defined as an internalized representation of the world or an ingrained and systematic pattern or thoughts, action, and problem solving. Our schemata are developed through social learning or direct learning. Both processes involve assimilation, which is

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