Philippe Rochat
Others in Mind
Other in Mind is neither just another dry academic book, nor a self-help book. It is about sharing what I see as a crucial aspect of what makes us part of a self-reflective species. It is an invitation to explore what it means to be human, alive in this world, and how we construe our being in relation to others.
I have meant the book to be more than an academic concoction for the few initiated specialists. Based on empirical observations, primarily developmental observations of children, Others in Mind is a book of ideas, taping into both developmental and anthropological phenomena and guided by strong existential intuitions regarding the human condition. At the core of these intuitions, there is the idea that human psychic life is predominantly determined by what we imagine others perceive of us.
I write in the book that “the struggle for recognition is the struggle for existence itself.”
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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