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Peter Hobson is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychologist. He is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Tavistock Clinic and a professor in the Psychiatry Department at University College, London. Hobson has long been interested in the development of thought and language and in the condition of autism, in which thought and language are tragically impaired. In this volume,1 he reports on his and others' investigations into the way in which thinking and speaking emerge out of the infant's experience within the emotionally charged, bidirectional, social interaction with caretakers that begins soon after birth. As Hobson puts it:
Communication involves affecting and being affected by someone else. The transaction involves the transmission of feelings, thoughts or whatever between two minds. Therefore sharing—and if my argument is correct, sharing implicates feelings—is at the root of all communication and
He previously authored Autism and the Development of Mind (1995, London: Taylor and Francis).
Page 1139all intentions to communicate.… a child's understanding of the mental and the physical is an understanding of two different aspects of the same thing—persons. [pp. 259-260, italics in original]
This process of understanding starts right after birth:
To begin with … the infant registers the adult as attuned to herself. Such awareness is present from two months at least. Next the infant becomes aware that an adult is orientated to what she is doing.… Then [at about a year] the infant begins to relate to an adult's actions and attitudes towards something quite separate from either herself or the adult. It is this achievement which shows that the infant has reached the stage of secondary intersubjectivity. [p. 64]
There is an apparently stepwise development of successive levels of interpersonal engagement:
In the earliest months of life, a baby begins by experiencing people as a special kind of thing. Towards the end of the first year, she relates to them as beings with a