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Psychoanalysis, in its attempts to probe the human mind in all its genetic and current dimensions and complexities, its oedipal conflicts, its preoedipal identity crises, is faced with tangled riddles as seemingly unravelable as the Sphynxian one that confronted Oedipus. How does a neonate emerge from a preobject world into what Mahler called the psychological birth of the human infant? That topic alone has been the subject of books, debates, and controversies, but if it can be agreed on that after the twin tasks of attachment and individuation have been engaged by the human child in the first eighteen months of life, and somewhat resolved in the next eighteen, another challenge faces the infant, which is the subject matter of this remarkable book. A human being does not merely have to attach to his or her parents and then develop a sense of individuation from them. A developing psyche does not merely have to engage the paradox of independent selfhood emerging from a learned trust in utter dependency on initial nurturing objects. No, there is more. Having established an attached but also individuated identity, a child must develop the capacity to care about what