Jean Piaget

Jean William Fritz Piaget

Psychologist Jean Piaget identified stages of mental development, called Schema, and established the fields of cognitive theory and developmental psychology.
Early life
Biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was his parents’ first child. Piaget’s mother, Rebecca Jackson, attributed his intense early interest in the sciences to his own neurotic tendencies. Yet Piaget’s father, a medieval literature professor named Arthur, modeled a passionate dedication to his studies—a trait that Jean Piaget began to emulate from an early age. At just 10 years old, Piaget’s fascination with mollusks drew him to the local museum of natural history, where he stared at specimens for hours on end. When he was 11 and attending Neuchâtel Latin High School, Piaget wrote a short scientific paper on the albino sparrow. By the time he was a teen, his papers on mollusks were being widely published. Piaget’s readers were unaware of his age and considered him an expert on the topic.

After high school, Piaget went on to study zoology at the University of Neuchâtel, receiving his Ph.D. in the natural sciences in 1918. In 1918, Piaget spent a semester studying psychology under Carl Jung and Paul Eugen Bleuler at the University of Zürich, where Piaget developed a deeper interest in psychoanalysis. Over the course of the next year, he studied abnormal psychology at the Sorbonne in paris.