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Julio Moreno's unique, appealing, erudite, and highly original Ser Humano made me feel nostalgic for the psychoanalytic language from that part of the world where its author lives, thinks, and practices, a language of rich, strange, and unusual voices. The Spanish title means both “human being” and “to be human,” and its focus is the question the author asks: What makes humans human? What is it exactly that constituted the extraordinary leap, only forty thousand years ago, from the line of primates to a uniquely human developmental line?
Moreno, a child analyst and training and supervising analyst at the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association, is unusually qualified to ponder this question. A successful published researcher in the biological sciences, he brings to the quest for the origin of the humanity of humans thinking that is deeply rooted in hard science and a vast acquaintance with philosophy, social and cultural studies, mathematics, logic, and history, in addition to his profound knowledge of psychoanalysis. Under Moreno's intriguing guidance, we may well wonder how we could have neglected this puzzle.
He begins by making the point that some of what we consider human exists in animals: that is, the possibility of change. What for him is specifically human is the capacity to both vary and change, the capacity to incessantly generate changes. Despite their relative