Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-291) and index.

"In The Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson presents a new and provocative theory about the nature and origins of uniquely human thinking." "A prevailing opinion on the acquisition of thought and language is that babies are born with pre-programmed modules in the brain. But this is too narrow and too simplistic an explanation. Professor Hobson's radical view is that what gives us the capacity to think is the quality of a baby's exchanges with other people over the first eighteen months of life. As part and parcel of an intellectual revolution in the second year, the child achieves new insight into the minds of itself and others. Human thought, language, and self-awareness are developed in the cradle of emotional engagement between infant and caregiver; social contact has vital significance for mental development." "Professor Hobson draws on twenty years of clinical experience and academic research as a development psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He follows the thread of mental development over the first eighteen months of a baby's life to describe and to explain the emergence of thinking; he shares startling insights into mental development gained from his studies of autism; and he shows how, from infancy to adulthood, disturbances of thinking may be rooted in troubled early relationships. Finally, he pinpoints tiny but momentous changes in the social relations of pre-human primates from which human thought sprang."--Jacket.

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