Lerner, Richard M.

Historical Roots of Lerner's Basic Developmental Research

Lerner's career in human development began in 1966, in his first year as a doctoral student in the psychology doctoral program within the City University of New York. As an undergraduate, Lerner was exposed to the work of Donald Hebb, which he initially interpreted as pertaining to physiological psychology. However, under the guidance of Elizabeth Gellert and, most important, Sam J. Korn, Lerner learned that Hebb (1949) was actually presenting a theory of development. This developmental theory stated that the organism and environment interact to bring organization to the brain and, ultimately, to the individual's behavior. This was Lerner's first exposure to the idea that a relation between organism and context constituted the basic process of development. Furthermore, he found that such influences between the two levels within this relation enabled the potential for plasticity in brain organization and behavior to be actualized (Lerner, 1982, 1984, 2002a).

While still a graduate student, and again through Sam Korn's tutelage, Lerner was exposed to some of the key philosophical issues of development, such as teleology, organicism, and the mechanist/reductionist perspective. He was also introduced to the scholarship of developmental scientists whose theory and research would come to be a major influence on his work, most notably Heinz Werner and especially T. C. Schneirla. [Page 651]Schneirla was a comparative psychologist whose research dealt mainly with army ants and kittens. Through his dissertation and almost 15 years of postdoctoral research, Lerner, focusing on human development, extended Schneirla's ideas of organism-experience relations as the basis of developmental processes. For example, for his dissertation, Lerner used the idea of circular functions (individuals both influence and are influenced by their contexts and are thus a source of their own development) to frame a study of the role of individual differences in male children's and adolescents' body builds for their personality and social development.

Despite being successfully defended, there was one foreshadowing objection to his work by the psychology faculty: that the dissertation was more sociological or anthropological than psychological. In retrospect, this dissertation presaged Lerner's career as a scholar who draws from multiple fields to understand development. The larger theoretical extension of Schneirla's work that Lerner made was to show that a personological analysis of individual development is incomplete. To understand development, one needs to understand the mutually influential relations between individual and context (represented as individual ←→ context relations) and that there are multiple levels of organization that compose the context, for example, social relationships, social institutions, and culture. One could not rely on psychology alone to understand the breadth of the relations between the individual and the context that compose the basic process of human development.

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