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The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life is a comprehensive yet digestible synthesis of the research and theory on early emotional development. In pulling together developmental psychology research and neuroscience, author Michael Lewis offers clinicians another angle from which to understand normal development, attachment, and the development of the self. Lewis anchors his book, and the arc of emotional development, around his conception of consciousness. Lewis states that consciousness is “This human capacity to be in the past and in the future while being in the present … Consciousness is our self referential ability, the ability to think about ourselves … our ability to have and to recognize feelings about ourselves” (p. viii). This concept certainly echoes aspects of Peter Fonagy's defined capacity for mentalization (Fonagy et al., 1991, 2002); however, Lewis's developmental and experimental lens alternately compliments and challenges the attachment based, psychoanalytic perspective on early emotional life.
While Lewis values psychoanalytic theory, he sharply criticizes the “monotropic” emphasis (p. x) on the mother-infant relationship, arguing that this relationship is not as central in determining future emotional functioning as we would like to believe. Using evidence from lab experiments and neuroscience, Lewis presents a model that begins with “action patterns,” biological substrates of emotions that are largely hardwired (p. xii). Attachment theory emphasizes the role of the mother as mediator and mirroring agent; through her scaffolding and responsivity, the child begins to label and organize these primary emotions. From this perspective, it is this process that facilitates the development of the self, the capacity for reflection, and the capacity to self-regulate (Bateman & Fonagy, 2004; Fonagy & Bateman, 2006; Slade, 2005). Lewis appreciates the importance of the maternal relationship in emotional development and plays lip service