You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At first glance the title of this book suggested that it would be light reading for the clinical therapist with perhaps interesting and delightful passages from literature, poetry, and the arts, depicting the inner lives of characters with analogies to the clinical setting of deeply emotive, explorative work that is normally encountered in psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalysis. Instead this book is a deeply considered and compellingly discussed theory of the origin, of thought and mind that is consistent with the latest theories in linguistics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and developmental psychology. Meares is concerned with the fundamental question of “how the self comes into being not only in therapy but also in human development and evolution.” As a result, the task of this reviewer was to examine each paragraph for theoretical assertions that were consistent with the latest accepted scientific reasoning. From common experience it is expected that most writers of theory of mind reduce complex phenomena to metaphors that, although often elegantly explicated, invariably fail to open up new areas of research or new clinical approaches; or just new understanding of commonly observed human behavior. Freud at least opened an entirely new approach to the phenomenology of dreams and the unconscious mind by his entirely ground breaking work “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Meares may have accomplished to a lesser degree a new understanding of the importance of infantile babbling and symbolic play of the first years of life and its immediate relationship to mothering as well as its importance to speech and early development of thought and mind.
The theme of this book is that through sing-song proto-conversation first initiated by parents to the passively watching and listening newborn, internal psychological connectedness that mirrors physical feelings is made and internalized. It is manifested later in the babbling of babies and the symbolic play o