Contemporary Relevance of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart Research Paper

Contemporary Relevance of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart - Research Paper Example However, Mr. Poe’s narrator and many criminals today do not fall under the innocent by reason of insanity verdict. The problem becomes this narrator felt guilty about his actions. That rules out a by reason of insanity verdict. The human conscious makes sane people feel guilty about the act of unjustified murder. The narrator and the contemporary murders that felt guilt are to be judged sane. The insanity defense has been used for murder acquittal or an explanation for murder in the United States since Edgar Allan Poe’s time. Although many feel the insanity defense is a lighter sentence, Greene and Heilbrun in Wrightsman’s Psychology and the Legal System points out that an individual found not guilty by reason of insanity will remain in a psychiatric facility longer than if sentenced to prison (213). Under U.S. law a person found not guilty by reason of insanity will remain in a psychiatric facility until doctors find them sane again. Andrea Yates is an example o f this. Maria Newman’s â€Å"Yates Found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity† states â€Å"Ms. ... The narrator would remain in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life, or until the noise got too much for him to bear resulting in suicide. Poe’s narrator believes he is mad or insane. In fact, the narrator embraces his madness. The narrator states in the first paragraph â€Å"but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses---not destroyed---not dulled them† (Poe 3). The narrator cannot come up with any other reason for murdering the old man. He did not dislike him. The narrator admits â€Å"Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man† (Poe 3). In Poe’s time to murder without reason was to be considered quite mad. Today it is defined as a psychopath. It is not considered madness. However, that does not stop individuals like Andrea Yates or Jeffrey Dahmer, among a few, to try and explain their murderous actions by claiming insanity. The insanity of Poe’s narrator, like with anyone else, has to be questioned. The law and citizen alike are skeptical of the insanity defense. Greta Olsen’s article â€Å"Reconsidering Unreliability: Faillible and Untrustworthy Narrators† explains â€Å"Whenever an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get that point. Irony is always thus in part a device for excluding as well as for including, and those who are included, those who happen to have the necessary information to grasp the irony, cannot but derive at least a part of their pleasure from a sense that others are excluded.† As a reader, Poe’s narrator in â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart† comes across honest in his madness. However, Olsen makes a good point. The narrator is colluding with the

Critically evaluate the cognitive development theories of Piaget and Essay

Critically evaluate the cognitive development theories of Piaget and Vygotsky and discuss their relevance to Social Work practice - Essay Example He came up with the cognitive development theory where he showed two major aspects to his theory: the process of coming to know and the stages used to acquire the ability to know. In his book, Miller, (2002, p.32) stated that Piaget viewed knowledge as a process and that children have an active process of knowing their surrounding. As a biologist, he was interested in how a given organism adapts to its environment. Behaviour is controlled through mental organization where an individual uses some schemes to represent the world and designate action. This adaptation is motivated by biological drive to obtain balance between the schemes and the environment. Piaget hypothesized that an infant is born with schemes that operate from birth. These schemes are reflexes which are used to adapt the environment and are later replaced by constructed schemes. He described two processes that are used by individual to adapt to the environment; assimilation and accommodation. These processes are used throughout life as the person progressively adapts to the environment in a more complex way. Assimilation is a process of transforming the environment so that it can be suitable in the pre-existing cognitive structures. An example is where an infant uses a sucking schema that was developed by sucking a small bottle when trying to suck a larger bottle. Accommodation on the other hand, is the process of changing the cognitive structures in order to accept anything from the environment. An example would be when the child wants to modify a sucking schema that was developed through sucking on a pacifier to one that could be thriving for sucking on a bottle. The two processes are simultaneously useful throughout life. Piaget proposes that there are four distinct stages of mental representation that children pass through right from their infancy stage to the adult level of intelligence. The four stages are; sensorimotor period, preoperation period, concrete operational stage and formal operational stage. Sensorimotor stage starts from birth to two years. It is the primary stage in cognitive development; this is where infants create an understanding of the world by coordinating the sensory experience with physical actions. They gain knowledge from the world through the physical actions hence, progress from reflexive instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought towards the end of the stage. Piaget subdivided the sensorimotor stage into six sub-stages. Simple reflexes are a sub-stage where the infant coordinates the sensation and action through reflexive behaviour. It starts right from birth to the period when the infant is one month old. First habits and primary circular reactions phase is the second sub-stage (Bateson 2005, p 127). It starts from one month to four months after birth. Other sub-stages include: secondary circular reaction phase, coordination of secondary circular reaction phase, tertiary circular reactions and curiosity and internalization of the schemes. By the end of sensorimotor stage, the child acquires the sense of object permanence. The child understands that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be heard, seen or touched. According to Piaget,