Psychic growth

Growth may be defined as the development of the psychosomatic power and aptitudes of the person, and of the display of new, more complex possibilities for fruitful interchange between the person and his or her environment. Intelligence grows from a stage of undifferentiated perception to that of unfolding abstract, logical-conceptual operations. While it develops, new, more complex and more powerful tools are acquired for knowing reality and adequately exchanging with it. These add to or integrate previous stages of the capacity for adaptation, so that each stage brings a perfection and complication of the cognitive structure which corresponds to the previous stage. The person matures, develops, increases his affectivity and perception of himself, his grasp and the structuring of social and natural reality. Growth in adaptation to the environment and possibility for interacting with the world is from a primary, affective symbiosis with the mother, through incipient structuring of the self leading to primary egocentrism to gradual integration with one's peers.