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This book by Harvard University's Professor of Developmental Psychology examines a number of major themes in the study of children's development. It begins with an over-arching essay on “Guiding Themes in Human Development”, and goes on to cover the topics of infancy, connectedness versus discontinuity in development, the establishment of morality, the emotions, the development of thought, and the role of the family.
These are issues which could hardly be more relevant for us as child psychotherapists, and expectations on beginning the book are high. The assumptions which structure how we think about, or even perceive, what we observe, are part of a theoretical framework we generally take for granted; the opportunity to step back and examine the framework itself, its differences and commonalities with other approaches, is very inviting. So too is the sense that the book will provide an up-to-date integration of current research and thinking in several crucial areas.
Not surprisingly, these over-high expectations are not fulfilled, though the second is fulfilled to a greater degree than the first. And not surprisingly in a book on psychology, Freud and psychoanalytic ideas are very little discussed (or acknowledged). In Kagan's account, they tend to be written off into something of an historical hinterland from which they still exercise a (questionable) influence on some current modes of thinking; and they are sometimes inaccurately presented.
Kagan argues that greater consideration should be given, in various areas of attachment, emotional development, self-awareness, etc., to the underlying maturationally based cognitive changes which make such development possible. However, this makes the book sound more monotonous, more mechanistic, and less interesting than it is in reality. (Despite the emphasis on cognition, he maintains, for instance, that feeling, not logic, sustains conscience, in opposition to Kohlberg.)
The chapters are of uneven value, at least to this reade