Borrowed Theories - Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan

Cooley and Mead are sociology's own (2.3.2, 2.3.3). But the discipline also borrowed heavily from psychology in building its account of the self — and the borrowings brought real insight along with real trouble.

This lesson takes four of them. The aim is not to teach you psychology. It is to show you what sociology used each for, and to model the operation 1.5.3 demanded: taking a neighbouring discipline seriously while noticing exactly where its claims stop being supported.

A child of six is given two sweets and told that her younger brother has none.

Explanation one. She wants both. Something in her says take them, and something else — a voice that sounds oddly like her mother's — says that is not what good girls do. She gives one over, and feels a small glow that is not about sweets.

Explanation two. Two years ago she could not have understood the situation at all. Now she can hold in mind that her brother has a viewpoint, that the sweets could be divided, and that "fair" means the same amount. Her thinking changed, and the sharing followed.

Explanation three. She shares because she will be praised if she does and scolded if she does not. Ask her why and she will say "because Amma said." At twelve she will say "because it's the rule." At twenty, perhaps, "because he is a person and it would be unfair not to."

Explanation four. She shares because he is her brother, he is small, and something in her responds to that — not a rule about fairness at all but an attention to a particular person who needs something.

Four accounts of one small act. They come from Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan respectively, and each is doing something the others do not.

Freud: society as an internal agency

Sigmund Freud's structural model divides the mind into three:

The id — the reservoir of instinctual drives, seeking immediate gratification, present from birth. The ego — the reality-oriented part, mediating between drives and what circumstances permit. The superego — the internalised voice of parental and social prohibition: conscience, and the ideals against which one is measured.

What sociology took. The superego is the discipline's real interest, and the reason Freud appears in this course. It is a model of society installed inside the person as a functioning agency — one that punishes with guilt, that operates without any external observer, and that the person experiences as their own conscience rather than as an imposition.

Notice how well that maps onto what you already have. It is Mead's "me" (2.3.3). It is Durkheim's collective conscience experienced from inside (4.2). It is 1.1.3's internalisation and 2.1.4's internal sanctions. Four traditions, working independently, arriving at the same finding — that social control's most powerful mechanism is located within the controlled.

Freud's larger argument in Civilization and Its Discontents is also genuinely sociological: civilisation requires the renunciation of drives, that renunciation produces a permanent reservoir of discontent, and social order is therefore purchased at a psychic cost. Whether or not you accept the theory of drives, the structure of the argument — order costs something, and the cost is borne internally — recurs throughout the discipline. Norbert Elias's civilising process (5.10) develops it historically; the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse, built critical theory partly on it (5.6).

What sociology should not take.

The claims are hard to falsify. Resistance to an interpretation can be read as confirming it, which is exactly the problem 1.5.3 identified.

The universality claim failed an early test — and the test was anthropological. Bronisław Malinowski, working in the Trobriand Islands, argued that the Oedipal configuration Freud described could not be universal, because Trobriand family structure was matrilineal: the mother's brother held the authority Freud attributed to the father, and the tensions Malinowski observed followed the authority relation rather than the biological one. The debate that followed is unresolved in detail and decisive in principle: the structure of a family determines the structure of its psychic conflicts, which makes the configuration social rather than natural. That is one of the earliest and clearest demonstrations of what comparative evidence does to a universal claim.

And the account of women is indefensible by any current standard, and was contested at the time.

Piaget: development has stages

Jean Piaget studied how children's thinking changes, and proposed a sequence: sensorimotor (roughly to two), preoperational (two to seven), concrete operational (seven to eleven), formal operational (eleven and up).

What sociology took, and it is more than most textbooks credit.

The capacity for perspective-taking develops. Mead's play and game stages (2.3.3) assume a child who becomes able to hold others' viewpoints. Piaget provided evidence that this capacity is not present from the start and emerges in a rough sequence. The two accounts fit remarkably well.

And — the genuinely sociological finding — peer relations matter more than adult authority for moral development. In The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget observed children playing marbles and found two moral orientations. Younger children treated the rules as fixed, external and sacred (moral realism, or heteronomous morality) — because rules came from adults, who are large and cannot be argued with. Older children, negotiating rules among equals, came to see them as agreements that could be changed by consent (autonomous morality).

His conclusion is one that belongs in this course: a morality of mutual respect develops in relations between equals, not in relations of authority. Which is a claim about social structure producing moral capacity — and it explains why the peer group (2.2.5) is a distinctive socialising environment rather than merely another influence.

What to be careful about. Later research found Piaget underestimated young children's abilities (tasks designed differently reveal competences his methods missed); stages are less discrete and less universal than proposed; and formal operational reasoning is far from universal in adults, being closely tied to schooling — which is itself a sociological finding.

Kohlberg: moral reasoning in stages

Lawrence Kohlberg extended Piaget to moral reasoning, using dilemmas — most famously Heinz, whose wife will die without a drug he cannot afford and which the chemist refuses to sell cheaply. Should he steal it?

Kohlberg was interested not in the answer but in the reasoning, and proposed three levels:

Pre-conventional — reasoning by consequences to oneself: punishment, reward, exchange. Conventional — reasoning by conformity to social expectations: being a good person, maintaining the social order and the law. Post-conventional — reasoning by principles held to be more fundamental than particular laws: rights, justice, universal ethical principles.

What sociology took. The observation that moral reasoning has structure and that it changes with social participation — and the useful finding that most adults reason conventionally most of the time, which is 2.1.3 and 2.3.3 from another angle: people follow rules because they are the rules.

The criticisms are serious and you should know them.

It measures reasoning, not conduct. The gap between what people say about a dilemma and what they do in one is large and well documented.

The sample. The original longitudinal study followed boys only, and the scheme was built from their responses before being applied to everyone.

And the cultural charge, which is the important one. The "highest" stage is an individualistic, principle-based, abstract-rights morality that closely resembles the moral outlook of educated Western liberals — with the consequence that people reasoning from community obligation, family duty or religious authority score lower on a developmental scale. That is not a neutral measurement; it is a hierarchy of moralities with the researcher's own near the top. Richard Shweder's research in Odisha is the best-known corrective: he found moral reasoning organised around three distinct ethics — autonomy (harm, rights, fairness), community (duty, hierarchy, interdependence) and divinity (purity, sanctity, natural order) — with different weights in different populations, and none reducible to an immature version of another.

This is 2.1.8's problem, arriving inside a psychological instrument: a local standard presented as a universal scale.

Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) is one of the most cited books in the human sciences, and it is also frequently misdescribed. It repays being taken apart carefully, because doing so is a model of how to read a famous critique.

The argument. Kohlberg's scale, built from male respondents, treats an ethic of justice — abstract principle, rights, impartial rules — as the mature endpoint. Gilligan argued that another moral orientation exists and is systematically scored as less developed: an ethic of care, which reasons from relationship, responsibility, attention to the particular person and the maintenance of connection. On this reading, a respondent who says the answer depends on who Heinz's wife is and what the chemist's circumstances are is not failing at abstraction; they are reasoning within a different framework.

What has held up, and it is substantial. The identification of care as a distinct and coherent moral orientation is now widely accepted, and it opened a large field — the ethics of care, and a body of sociological work on care as labour, obligation and social organisation (5.7, 9.1). And the methodological critique of Kohlberg — that a scale built from one population and applied to all will find that population most developed — is exactly right and generalises far beyond this case.

What has not held up so well. The empirical claim of a clear gender difference in moral orientation has weak support. Meta-analyses generally find small differences at most, considerable overlap, and orientations that vary more by the type of dilemma than by the sex of the respondent. Gilligan's own position on the strength of the gender claim shifted over time.

How to hold both. The lasting contribution is not "women reason differently." It is: a moral standard was built from one group and applied as universal, and a whole orientation was invisible until someone asked whose voice the scale encoded. That is a sociological insight of the first order, and it does not depend on the gender difference being large.

Note also the important warning: an argument can be enormously valuable and its headline empirical claim can be weak. Learning to separate those is 1.4.6's discipline applied to a book you are likely to admire.

Go deeper

What sociology's stance should be

Four rules, and they generalise to any borrowing from a neighbouring discipline.

Take the mechanism, question the universality. Freud's internal agency, Piaget's developing perspective-taking, Kohlberg's structured reasoning: all useful. Their claims to describe all humans everywhere: check against comparative evidence.

Ask who the sample was. Every one of these schemes was built from a narrow population — Viennese patients, Swiss schoolchildren, American boys — and generalised. This is 2.1.10's WEIRD problem, arriving one theory at a time.

Ask what is at the top of the ladder. Any developmental scheme that ranks people has an endpoint, and the endpoint is a value judgement wearing a lab coat. Whose morality is "post-conventional"? Whose thinking is "formal operational"? Notice, every time.

And keep explanation at the right level (1.4.1). These theories explain processes inside individuals. They cannot explain why moral standards differ between groups, why they change over decades, or why they are enforced unequally. Using them for that is psychologism.

The genuinely useful synthesis

What survives from all four, once the universality claims are set aside, is a coherent and sociologically usable picture:

Moral capacity develops and requires social interaction — it is not present at birth and does not appear without others (2.3.1).

External authority becomes internal agency — the shared finding of Freud, Mead, Durkheim and 1.1.3, arrived at four times independently.

Relations among equals produce a different morality from relations of authority — Piaget's marbles, and one of the best reasons to take the peer group seriously.

Moral reasoning is patterned rather than random, and most adults most of the time reason conventionally.

And moral frameworks are plural — autonomy, community, divinity, justice, care — with different weights in different societies and different situations, and no defensible scale on which one is simply more developed than another.

That last point is where this lesson delivers you to Part 6, and it is worth noticing that a psychology lesson has arrived at a decolonial conclusion by its own route.

"Freud proved the superego exists." He proposed a model. What sociology uses is the idea of society as an internal agency — an idea independently arrived at by Mead and Durkheim, which is the real evidence for it.

"Piaget's stages are fixed ages." A rough sequence with considerable variation, and later work found he underestimated young children.

"Kohlberg measured moral development." He measured moral reasoning about hypothetical dilemmas, which correlates only loosely with conduct — and on a scale whose top is a specific cultural outlook.

"Gilligan showed women reason differently from men." The gender-difference evidence is weak. The lasting contribution is the identification of an ethic of care and the demonstration that the scale encoded one group's voice.

"These theories explain differences between societies." They explain processes within individuals. Between-group differences require sociology (1.4.1).

"Psychology is a rival to be resisted." 1.5.3's warning: a sociology that refuses to engage is easier to dismiss, and worse at showing where universal claims actually fail.

Why it matters

It gives you a worked example of intellectual borrowing done properly. Take the mechanism, check the sample, locate the value judgement, keep the level straight. You will need this every time sociology touches economics, psychology, biology or neuroscience.

It supplies what Mead left out. Mead assumed a developing capacity for role-taking; Piaget showed it develops and how. Together they are a stronger account than either alone.

It shows a universal scale being dismantled by comparative evidence — Malinowski on the Oedipus complex, Shweder on the three ethics — which is precisely the operation Part 6 performs on sociology's own universal claims. That parallel is not incidental. It is the same intellectual move.

And it leaves you with a durable question. Whenever anyone presents a developmental scale — of morality, civilisation, maturity, or economic development — ask what is at the top and who put it there.

Sociology borrowed from psychology to explain the self, and each borrowing brought insight and an over-claim.

Freud: the superego is society installed as an internal agency — converging with Mead's "me," Durkheim's collective conscience and 1.1.3's internalisation. Elias and the Frankfurt School build on him. But the claims resist falsification, and Malinowski's Trobriand work showed the Oedipal configuration follows family authority structure, making it social rather than natural.

Piaget: perspective-taking develops in stages, supplying what Mead assumed. His key sociological finding: a morality of mutual respect arises in relations among equals (marbles) rather than under adult authority — moral realism giving way to autonomous morality.

Kohlberg: moral reasoning is structured — pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional — and most adults reason conventionally. But it measures reasoning rather than conduct, was built from an all-male sample, and places one culture's morality at the top; Shweder's three ethics (autonomy, community, divinity) is the corrective.

Gilligan: the ethic of care alongside the ethic of justice. The identification of care and the critique of whose voice the scale encoded have held up; the empirical gender-difference claim has not.

Sociology's stance: take the mechanism, question universality, ask who the sample was and what sits at the top of the ladder, and keep explanation at the right level.

Id / ego / superego — Freud's structural model: drives, reality-mediation, and internalised prohibition.

Superego — the internalised parental and social authority experienced as conscience.

Oedipus complex — Freud's proposed configuration of childhood desire and rivalry; challenged as culture-bound by Malinowski.

Moral realism (heteronomous morality) — Piaget's early stage in which rules are experienced as fixed, external and sacred.

Autonomous morality — Piaget's later orientation in which rules are understood as agreements alterable by consent among equals.

Pre-conventional / conventional / post-conventional — Kohlberg's three levels of moral reasoning.

Heinz dilemma — Kohlberg's best-known moral dilemma, used to elicit reasoning rather than answers.

Ethic of justice — moral reasoning from abstract principle, rights and impartial rules.

Ethic of care — moral reasoning from relationship, responsibility and attention to particular persons (Gilligan).

Three ethics (autonomy, community, divinity) — Shweder's comparative account of distinct moral frameworks.

Psychologism — explaining social patterns purely by individual psychology (1.4.1).

One — four explanations. Take one moral act you performed recently. Explain it four times: as internalised prohibition, as a cognitive capacity, as a stage of reasoning, and as care for a particular person. Note which feels truest — and that the answer may say more about your society than about you.

Two — find the top of a ladder. Locate any developmental or ranking scheme you encounter this week — of maturity, civilisation, professionalism, economic development. Identify what is at the top and whose outlook it resembles.

Three — Piaget's marbles. Watch or recall children negotiating the rules of a game among themselves. Note the moment someone says "we could change it." That is autonomous morality appearing, and it appears among equals.

Four — separate argument from evidence. Take a book or idea you admire. Identify its central argument and its headline empirical claim, and ask whether the first would survive if the second turned out to be weak. This is the Gilligan exercise, applied to your own commitments.