This intelligent and highly readable book, edited by James Barron, tackles one of the most enduring paradoxes of human psychology: the paradox of a mind that sometimes can know and then not know some fact about itself; the paradox of how we can bridge the chasm between I, the observer, and me, the observed, at one moment, but, despite this ability, require analysis by another to remain observable to ourselves.

Virginia Demos, whose body of work on the origins of mind is one of the gems to have emerged from the proliferation of speculations about infant subjectivity, opens Part I of the book by addressing the question: What accounts for individual variations in the extent to which we can generate and sustain enough interest in our inner experiences to even want to analyze ourselves? We all construct representations, regulate emotional experience, and act with agency upon the physical and emotional world; but it is other people who open up opportunities for or impose constraints upon our reflective self-awareness of these mental activities by “communieating