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This book stakes out a position on the question of what makes us human; specifically, how much to grant to biology and how much to culture. Throughout the ages, answers to this question have sought a
balance between the two poles of the nature-nurture dichotomy, with resulting cycles during which one pole and then the other is in ascendance for a while. Currently there is a great deal of renewed interest in the biological dimensions of our nature, influenced by scientific and technological advances in fields such as genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. With its beginnings firmly rooted in our biology, psychoanalysis is finding the current zeitgeist very compatible (as evidenced by the new journal Neuro-psychoanalysis).
As is clear from its title, this book emphasizes the cultural dimensions, or “sociogenesis.” As such, it offers psychoanalytic readers an alternative perspective, with the further twist that it recasts the nature-nurture dichotomy in terms of primate studies: what do we share with other primates, on the one hand, and what are the effects of our shared history with conspecifics, on the other? Tomasello's position is that we share a great deal with other primates, such as our capacities for: spatial orientation; classification and permanence of objects; and recognizing conspecifics and their affiliative and dominance relations (e.g., the horizontal and vertical patterns of kinship in humans). Furthermore, with our closet primate relatives even more is shared, such as the abilities to “predict the behavior of individuals based on such things as their emotional state and their direction of locomotion; use many types of social and communicative strategies to out-compete groupmates for valued resources; cooperate with conspecifics, in problem-solving tasks and in forming social coalitions and alliances; [and] engage in various forms of social learning in which [we] learn valuable things from conspecifics” (p. 17).
Since the author is codirector