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Like psychoanalysts do in theorizing and in clinical practice, the contributors to this edited volume concern themselves with some of the fundamental questions of human development: What constitutes a formative experience? How do we understand the centrality of early experiences in shaping brain function and behavior? If early caregiving experience is formative and sets the foundation for subsequent development, how can this be modified? What effect does cultural context have on personality development? What are the mechanisms—psychological, social, and cultural—through which intergenerational patterns of behavior and meaning are transmitted? How do we understand the paradox that early experience shapes life-course development and yet can be significantly changed through experience? In his foreword to the book, Robert Sapolsky affirms that effects, as psychoanalysts know, “aren't necessarily permanent, nor are changes necessarily easy” (p. xxvi).
Formative Experiences is wide in scope and written from several disciplinary perspectives. The authors include both researchers and practitioners from the fields of neuroscience, developmental psychobiology, anthropology, psychiatry, and psychology. They address the nature of early experience and change at the level of cell activity and brain function, animal research, child development, parent-child interaction, environment and culture, and global events, so the chapters move back and forth between the micro and the macro perspective. A few of the authors work