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The First Idea, a story of rich subplots woven by Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker, proceeds by way of ongoing juxtapositions, especially of the authors? models of aspects of individual human development and their new ideas about human evolution. Greenspan brings
to this project a lifetime of practice, research, and writing about human development. Similarly, for Shanker this book has been years in the making; he has worked as a philosopher and psychologist with interests ranging to artificial intelligence, human and primate languages, and more. Together the authors take the reader on a fascinating tour of ideas.
Traditionally, human evolution has been the concern of apparently disparate fields of knowledge. Greenspan and Shanker hope here both to unify these fields and to add what has been missing. Discussing issues in child development, primate research, archaeology, linguistics, and biology (especially neuroscience), they show how current ways of understanding ourselves often miss the developmental perspective and consistently overlook the significance of emotion.
One appeal of this book is its unabashed attempt to pose and answer basic questions. How did humans evolve? Was there a “first idea”? If so, how might that have evolved, when, and under what conditions? What might be the relations and comparisons between human evolution, primate evolution, and human and primate development? A second appeal of the book is in its repeatedly sharp challenges to current theory in a number of academic fields of relevance to psychoanalysis. These challenges hinge especially on two crucial concepts: first, that understandings of humans and their development are often simplistic and mechanical, lacking attention to broader complexities and the centrality of interactions in life; second, that there are significant problems with the ways we have thought about emotion and its role in human life.
Greenspan and Shanker challenge conventional understandings of emotion that so ofte