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Jerome Kagan is Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Aside from holding a prestigious endowed chair, he is a developmental psychologist of the first rank, who has made important contributions to our understanding of child development, Piagetian theory, and the theoretical underpinnings of life span developmental processes. As tends to be the case in academic social science these days, his interests range broadly over a variety of interesting topics, with no clear disciplinary boundaries confining his thinking.
Because academic research today often resists translation into the folk psychology of everyday life, Kagan has taken it upon himself to write a book easily read by the general public. This volume attempts to strike a balance between loyalty to intellectual rigor and the canons of academic research, on the one hand, and, on the other, the wish to share ideas with nontechnical readers. Kagan does a fine job of managing this tension, and has produced a book that can be read and easily understood by most psychoanalysts, even those not schooled in developmental psychology or sophisticated in research. It is specifically the research Kagan has conducted over the course of his career that he is attempting to distill and make available to a wider audience.
The three seductive ideas alluded to in the title are that (1) most psychological processes generalize broadly; (2) early infantile experiences