Philippe Rochat
Others in Mind
Others in Mind is a book about self-consciousness: how it originates and how it shapes our lives. Self-consciousness is arguably the most important and revealing of all psychological issues. Why are we so prone to guilt and embarrassment? Why do we care so much about how others see us, about our reputation? What are the origins of such afflictions? The book deals with the issue of self-consciousness as a unique feature of the human psychological condition.
It is because we are members of a species that evolved the unique propensity to reflect upon the self as object of thoughts—and one that is potentially evaluated by others. But, the argument goes, this propensity comes from a basic fear: the fear of rejection, of being socially “banned” and ostracized.
From this simple premise, I look at young children and their development, but also at many other intriguing human propensities, to see what they have to tell us about the social origins and nature of human self-consciousness.
The main idea I develop in the book is that human psychic life is predominantly determined by what we imagine others perceive of us. We exist and gauge the worth of our existence primarily through the eyes of others. More importantly, others also determine whether I am right to feel safe, in particular, safe of not being rejected by them. Feeling safe is part of the “good life” and it is inseparable from the feeling of being affiliated. The argument I propose is that it all depends on the recognition and acknowledgment of self by others.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Others in Mind
Philippe Rochat Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness Cambridge University Press 264 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0521729659
Available here →November 25, 2009
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Philippe Rochat with his daughter Cléo
Philippe Rochat
Philippe Rochat was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, trained by Jean Piaget and his collaborators, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Geneva in 1984. After a series of postdoctoral positions at Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Massachusetts, in the early 1990s he joined the Faculty at Emory University in Atlanta, where he continues to be a professor of psychology. Rochat has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow, single-authored three books, edited two, co-edited one, and written close to one hundred scholarly articles on infant and child development. His 2001 book The Infant World, published by Harvard University Press, was translated into Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish and Danish. His current research is on early learning, the development of social cognition and the emergence of a moral sense during the preschool years in children from all over the world, who grow up and are raised in highly contrasted cultural environments, as well as highly contrasted socio-economic circumstances.
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Self-consciousness grows out of the fear of being rejected, and to be ignored is psychological death.
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