Werner's relevance for contemporary developmental psychology.

Abstract

Heinz Werner's contributions to contemporary developmental psychology are considered in terms of 3 major books that form the cornerstones of his enterprise. The fit or lack of it between Werner's theory and current practices of developmental psychologists is evaluated, and the tensions between his theory and those practices are identified. The core issue explored is the relation between what Werner identified as a developmental and the means by which topics are studied in practice. The mismatch between the Wernerian topic and the topics in the field is then used as a way of clarifying the relevance of Werner's theory to contemporary developmental issues and as a way of identifying some of the misinterpretations of his works. When a field formally undertakes an examination of its past, it is often a way of finding its present. The search for accomplishes, intentionally or not, two related goals. On the one hand, the past is constructed so as to legitimize the present by giving it a history, grounding some current practices and understandings in a tradition, leading from the past, that seems to point to the present. The present is then seen as an extension of the fundamental insights of that past. On the other hand, finding a can be a way of relegating figures of potentially contemporary relevance to history and, hence, outside of the domain of current interests. In both of these senses, finding one's is really a way of constructing oneself in the present. These processes are particularly apparent in the '80s and '90s, during which this process of selective construction is seen at an accelerated pace, with figures at temporal distance treated as contemporaries and some more historically proximal thinkers put in the past as historical relics. At the outset then, I must confess a certain tension in presenting Heinz Werner as part of a historical series of articles. I am not sure that he belongs there. In many senses, although he is currently mostly forgotten, those of us who trained with him or who occupied the same departmental space cannot treat him as part of history. In some respects, Werner was a very modern thinker whose theoretical views were so at variance with normal professional practices that his message is yet to be heard. Werner died in 1964, approximately 30 years after Vygotsky and 16 years before Piaget. If you attempt to judge Werner's impact on the field from the volume of citations in current references in journals, books, or book chapters, it would seem that his psychology has had little impact. In cases in which he is cited, it appears that his views have been transcended by better information or more modern conceptualizations. Many of the remaining citations of Werner put him even more firmly in the past by putting his work on the wrong side of areas of contemporary consensus, particularly with respect to what are presented as his views about psychological functioning in non-Western