Piaget Viewed Today Via Kenneth

¶ … Piaget Viewed Today Via Kenneth Kaye?

As always, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of them even stand on their father's shoulders.

This is absolutely the same in the field of cognitive psychology. The work of Piaget is very prescient today just as it was seventy years ago and it is being expanded in new directions. Sometimes this can be viewed in the mirror when we see a scholar go in another direction. In any terms, Piaget's shadow is large and many scholars carry on the work.

Kenneth Kaye is one of these newer scholars whose work has been very influential from the 1980's until the present. While his work is built upon Piaget's work with infants, it has diverged. Kaye has theorized and also demonstrated that the psychological powers that distinguish us come not intrinsically from the innate capacities of the human infant to biologically reorganize themselves. Rather, they are shaped gradually by interactions that are the result of the co-evolution of human adult behavior and infant behavior simultaneously. Kaye traced these pivotal events and find that they begin with maternal responses to infantile physiological and neurological bursts in utero. He tracked this activity through transactions where adults adjust to the baby's perceived and projected intentions and tracked this on further to true dialogue where symbolic language is now possible (Kaye, 1982, 11 and 30).

Kaye has taken his practice further since 1986 since he began to specialize more by consulting for family businesses. He started a trend amongst psychologists by being the first to do so and phased out his general practice by the mid-nineties. In this vein he has taken the Piagetian method into the workplace. In his 2005 work about family business conflicts, he observes and explains the underlying causes of strife when he remarks that "Traditional methods of conflict resolution assume that people are truly fighting about what they say they are fighting about and that they want to resolve their problems rationally. Family arguments, however, are far more subtle and far less rational. Family members frequently conspire to sustain conflict because it helps them avoid something they fear might be even worse that the devil they know (Kaye, 2005, 7). In other words, he uses the Piagetian method to examine the subrosa motivating factors that can split family businesses asunder.

In the 2009 work written by Kaye and his son Nick, he continues the family business. Their book cuts right to the chase in terms of examining a basic business issue and family issue, that is, trust. Without it, financial, business and family planning is impossible. Indeed, one of the basic assumption that a parent makes is that the child can make their way in the world and that the parent can now relax a bit. Unfortunately, in today's world, many children have found themselves moving back in with the parents. This causes stresses in the parent and child relationship, especially as the parents grow closer to retirement. The subject of this study was very close at hand for Kaye Senior, that is, his son Nick. The freelance job he had ended and then his internet and cell phone service were cut off for nonpayment. The parents had to trust him that he was telling the truth. They bailed him out of course, and the rest is publishing history (Kaye and Kaye, 2009, 1-2). The trust chapter explores why so much of this is fiduciary. Unfortunately, even our closest relationships seem to be based upon money but have underlying factors that take a psychologist to figure out.