PERCEPTION AND ACCEPTANCE OF POWER RELATIONS IN CHILDREN

Abstract

This report is based on the works of Jean Piaget and on his distinction between the two types of social relations, "constraint and cooperation, the former implying an element of unilateral respect, authority, and prestige; the latter a single exchange between equal individuals''.1 Constraint is linked to childish egocentrism; "because the child is un- able to establish a real mutual contact between the adult and himself that he remains locked up in his self. The notion of egocentrism is, for Piaget, an intellectual one; "the specific character of egocentrism is not to be found in the social or moral domain, even not in the domain of conscience, but on the intellectual level... from a negative point of view this attitude opposes the relatedness to the universe and to a coordinated sense of perspectives, that is to say, briefly, to impersonal activity. On the positive side, this attitude consists in the absorption of the self in things and social groups. To get out of his egocentrism will then necessitate for the subject... the ability to dissociate subject from object, that is to say to become conscious of what is subjective to him, to locate oneself among the set of possible perspectives and, therefore, to establish between the things and his proper self a system of common and reciprocal relations ....