Customer Reviews

Mind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are smitten with child development research you will havea love affair with this book . A range of chapters by American and English authors offers an overview of developmental research with an emphasis on mentalization " Almost all the players are here ....

Fonagy and his colleagues present a distubed and disturbing view of human life, stating that the development of the prefrontal neocortex occurred so that we may compete with each other for imagined superiority earned through our ability to 'out smart' others and thereby gain acceptance into the superior social group. Once again psychoanalysis has created a bleak and meaningless horizon within which human beings are 'imagined' to live out their lives. Need we ask who might be members of this superior group? Might it be the author and his colleagues? Is there anything which might deliver us ordinary human beings from a life of subordination? My guess is that Fonagy et.al., have no idea what the source of such deliverence might be. To the faithful who idealize and consume this work I would say that I would choose to live in a much kinder and forgiving universe---but then they might say I was chosing to live in a world of 'pretending'.