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This book was written as a renewed collaboration between the Yale Child Study Center and the Anna Freud Centre in London. Their stated purpose is in promoting psychoanalytic developmental research. Presented as the first in a series of books entitled Developments in Psychoanalysis, this volume emphasizes the importance and influence of psychoanalysis not only in mental health, but also in the broader disciplines of literature, art, philosophy and history. Drawing from clinicians and researchers throughout the world, and true to contemporary thought, the contributors present and update the relational aspects and intertwining of the biological, genetic, and experiential roots of infancy and childhood as the basis for affiliation. They explore how it is that as humans we translate our thousands of intimate moments with others into genuine, intuitive, emotional connections to other people.
Having said the above, the first five chapters are excellent, if at times technical, theoretical and heady presentations of the history, development and merger of the psychoanalytic concepts of the affective unconscious with that of the cognitive unconscious. To this is added the accounts of the influence of our social-cultural experiences, or the social emergence of symbols and language (i.e., our internalized experiences of other people, their actions and relationships, and ultimately the emergence of ‘mind’). Several of these basic initial chapters present a contemporary review and updating of the findings from the studies of autism, research on the developmental achievements and progression of infant-caregiver interactions, the manner in which meaning arises out of cognitions within the body, and the development of mental representations.
The chapter by Gergely on ‘The social construction of the subjective self: the role of affect-mirroring, markedness, and ostensive communication in self-development’ not only gives a different view on the vagaries of intersubjectivity, but for Jung