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The purpose of this book is ambitious—nothing less than to explore intersubjectivity from a range of perspectives, delineating the ‘multiple interacting systems that are expressed by the dynamic interactions between the child, the family, and the social context’ (p. 174). In the Introduction, the authors acknowledge that the diversity of research fields that investigate intersubjectivity makes it difficult to establish a unified reference model. They have therefore chosen to take a more dialectical approach, in which the differing theoretical perspectives and language of each author are maintained, as well as highlighting areas of convergence between their respective models.
The first chapter focuses on ‘the quintessential nature of human beings as situated, feeling and acting bodies’ (page 2) and the proposal that intersubjectivity is rooted in intercorporeality, the embodied understanding human beings have of each other and of each other's motor goals and intentions. This approach to how we understand other minds is a ‘second-person’ approach or in Buber's terms an I-You relationship in contrast to a third-person, or I-It model offered by ‘theory of mind’ models of intersubjectivity. This chapter offers a succinct and beautifully clear summary of the mirror neuron research that underpins this embodied simulation model of intersubjectivity, ‘the neural basis of our capacity to be attuned to the intentional relations of others’ (p. 9). The authors show that this intentional attunement does not only apply to motor actions but also to emotion sharing and suggest that ‘our personal identity is—at least partly—the outcome of how our embodied simulation of others develops and takes shape’ (p. 24).
The second chapter shifts the focus onto the internal world of the mother and the ‘the importance of the maternal capacity during pregnancy to represent the fetus as a potential and intentional child for future parental mind-mindedness’ (p. 54). A research project that explored t