Briggs attempts to answer a question regarding the usefulness to anthropology of studying the individual. Hers is a study of the “mindsteps” of one three-year-old Inuit child living on Baffin Island. The author analyzes in detail “emotionally charged dramas” which play an important role in the socialization of Inuit children. The adults often ask emotionally powerful questions like, “Why don't you kill your baby brother?” The author explores these dramas and traces the child's frustrations, fears, and eventual coping with these questions during the socialization process. She uses cognitive, psychoanalytic, and social psychological concepts to do so.