Facilitator: Perhaps we should first poll the other participants to hear their thoughts about maturation and change.

Piaget, looking at Dr. Gilligan and Dr. Maslow:

Surely we all agree that maturation brings about physical change, but is the change merely quantitative? Is it only that the adult is no longer able to sleep in the crib? My observations indicate clear qualitative changes through four periods that I have labeled sensorimotor, pre-operations, concrete operations, and lastly formal operations.

Freud: I also agree that we do change in qualitative ways. Likewise, I have observed that people universally progress through four stages that are organized around body parts and functions: oral, anal, phallic, and genital.

Piaget: Monsieur, those labels do not fit my observations at all! I speak of mental operations. The sensorimotor stage is always first, no matter if the child is in New York or New Zealand, because the child must begin to learn by having interactions between himself and his environment. He senses, investigates, and manipulates his environment. At the other end of the spectrum, not all adolescents or even adults will reach the final formal operations stage. Surely your labels, Dr. Freud, are offensive to Dr. Gilligan.

Gilligan: If you are alluding to my gender, I do not find the language as offensive as the disregard. Many men, including Dr. Freud, do not understand that human development may be a significantly different experience for women in more ways than physical.

Maslow: Even if we accept your precept, does it alter the central problem we are addressing at this seminar?

Facilitator, looking at Dr. Gilligan for confirmation: Perhaps we should reconsider where we seem to be at this point in the dialogue. Unarguably, people change physically during maturation and the aging process. Do people change in other ways--for example, cognitively, emotionally, morally, and behaviorally--concomitantly, or rather as a function of biological change? Is that change qualitative, as Dr. Piaget and Dr. Freud have suggested? Does a description of these changes apply equally to all populations? Dr. Maslow, we have heard little from you.

Maslow: I am now, as have been for many years, struck by the little freedom so many of my esteemed colleagues' theories afford to the individual self. I believe a person can be quite active in determining her own possibilities for change.

Freud: I have also been wrongly accused in this matter. I see the individual as an active agent who is trying to reduce psychic tension brought about by the demands of human drives and culture. This is not at all mechanistic but, on the contrary, quite organismic.

Maslow: Though you call your human being an "active agent" and the process of reducing tension "dynamic," it seems that the person is still very much at the mercy of his drives.

Freud: I speak of drives; you speak of needs. I speak of reducing tension; you speak of being. I speak of equilibrium; you speak of growth. These seem to me matters of semantics.

Skinner: How true. We get caught in our language. For example, I, probably more than anyone else on this panel, believe that the human being is capable of change. I see this belief as quite positive. It means that we can be whatever we want to be within the confines of our species and level of biological maturation. Yet some people dismiss my theory on the grounds that it is too mechanistic.

Why do these people get caught up in vocabulary? They fear that I am saying that humans can be controlled. No. I am saying that reinforcing agents control human beings. We are under an illusion that we are free. We change in the direction of our reinforcement. No blocks exist against qualitatively different behaviors, but in fact we do simply change quantitatively and thus strengthen our associations.

Maslow: Indeed we must recognize the power of our environment in molding our behavior. We must also acknowledge the power of genetics in motivating our behaviors to meet certain needs. For these reasons I can align myself with Freudians and behaviorists. We accept these forces, however, so that eventually we can free ourselves from them and change in the direction of true humanness.

Gilligan: Some of your "true humanness" seems very masculine to me. Your self-actualized person does not exhibit the strong interdependent traits that many women value. The highest moral, cognitive, and ego states that you men have described do not depict the female experience.

Freud: Women may not have the same strength of conscience as their male counterparts because they have not needed to worry about castration as much as their brothers.

Gilligan: That is absurd. I wish to acknowledge your great contributions to the field of psychiatry, but some of your outrageous ideas must be exposed! Who can substantiate these wild claims he makes?

Freud: Regarding what, my dear?

Gilligan: Penis envy, for one.

Maslow: You might be experiencing it to some degree at this moment, Dr. Gilligan.

Gilligan: What you are experiencing, gentlemen, is a different voice. I don't think you've recognized it. Either you say women are inferior to men, or you say we are just alike. Neither is correct. We are different.

Piaget: Let me try to understand what you are saying. Gilligan: We are all rational beings.

Freud: Oh, you are wrong! We are conflicted, troubled, anxiety-ridden organisms seeking relief from psychic tension. This, in fact, is how we develop. We must constantly cope with the demands of our drives.

Piaget: I don't see it that way at all. We are, from the moment of our birth, curious scientists who explore our environment. We seek homeostasis or equilibrium but must satisfy our active, inquiring mind. Our development comes about through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. By means of our many interactions we encounter some information that can be taken in directly through our present framework of knowledge, or schema.

Other data we encounter seem to be slightly in contradiction to our present schema and so precipitate changes in our framework of knowledge. We must modify our schema to accommodate to this conflicting, incoming data.

At the present time we cannot comprehend data that is extremely different from our present knowledge schemes, but we are not at all irrational. At each stage we exhibit a coherent logic appropriate for it. We simply need time to mature and encounter appropriate experiences before we can function at the highest levels of reasoning.