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This is a difficult review for me to write: difficult because I've always had great respect for Jerome Kagan's role in moving developmental psychology away from a simplistic behaviorist perspective to a more all-encompassing view; difficult because I have found his inclusion of subjectivity a necessity in an academic psychology that had ignored it; and difficult because I find myself in agreement with about 75% of this book. The problem is that, even though he makes no claim to expertise in psychoanalytic thought, his critique of Freud is such that it needs a response, for it is so off-base and distorting of Freudian thinking that I must also question his views on some of the areas of psychology with which I am less informed.
Kagan questions three fin de siècle “truisms” of general psychology: the passion of abstraction or the belief “that most psychological processes generalize broadly” (p. 1), infant determinism, that “experiences during the first two years of life are preserved indefinitely” (p. 3); and what he calls the “pleasure principle” or the belief “that most human action is motivated by a desire for sensory pleasure” (p. 6).
As for the first seductive idea, that of abstractibility, Kagan correctly points out the need for understanding both agent and context, to avoid the tendency to overgeneralize. This is true in conjecturing not only from animal research to humans, but also from one level of discourse to another. As Kagan says in regard to the Zeitgeist of neuropsychologizing, “The fact that human consciousness became possible because of evolutionary changes in the brain does not mean that all true or theoretically useful statements about consciousness must include descriptions of brain states” (p. 40), and “Consciousness is best described as a set of emergent phenomena that require particular brain processes but are not equivalent to