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The Making of MindR. Peter Hobson Ph.D.Published online: 03 Dec 2014.

To cite this article: R. Peter Hobson Ph.D. (2014) The Making of Mind, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: ATopical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 34:8, 817-830, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968024

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Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34:817–830, 2014Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald SilverISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968024

The Making of Mind

R. Peter Hobson, Ph.D.

To understand how human beings come to have the mental faculties that they do, one would do wellto consider the making of mind in at least two senses. First, an evolutionary perspective promises tospecify what distinguishes Homo sapiens from nonhuman primate kin, and to set whatever is uniqueagainst a background of psychological abilities that we share with our ancestral relatives. Second, anaccount of individuals’ development from infancy onwards should enable one to see how humans’species-specific biological endowment dovetails with what the environment provides to yield specifi-cally human psychological capacities. In this article, I argue that to arrive at an overarching theoreticalexplanation, we should set the capacity to identify with the attitudes of other people at the very coreof evolutionary and developmental accounts.

Suppose you were asked: “What is special about human mentality?” And suppose that as youcaught your breath, your interrogator pressed on with two further questions: “How does thatspecialness arise? And what is psychoanalytic about the story?”

In this article, I do my best to address these questions. My research discipline is that of devel-opmental psychopathology, that is, the study of typical and atypical development in relation toone another. I suggest that when one considers typical infancy along with an atypical condi-tion, namely early childhood autism, and alongside this, adopts a psychoanalytic perspective onmental phenomena across the lifespan, one discovers a feature of psychology that is not onlydistinctive to humans, but also foundational for the development of a range of specially humanpsychological functions.

This (arguably) unique attribute of Homo sapiens is the propensity to identify with the atti-tudes of other people. It is a propensity that (a) distinguishes the biological constitution of humansfrom that of nonhuman primates, and in so doing, represents a basic level of human specialnessin the psychological domain; and (b) is responsible for shaping social and intellectual life fromearly infancy through to old age. In my view, it is critical to appreciate how far accomplish-ments distinctive to humans such as symbolic functioning and language, imaginative and creativethinking, and the manifold forms of complex social institutions are founded upon an individual’sinterpersonal engagements, together with his or her access to the accumulated artefacts of cul-ture. In addition, (c) identifying-with structures the architecture of human self-experience andboth conscious and unconscious object relational mental life.

If all or most of this is correct, it follows that the answer to the last of my three questions—“What is psychoanalytic about the story?”—is that in providing an account of the uniqueness ofhuman mentality, psychoanalytic concepts play pivotal roles every step of the way.

Dr. Hobson is Member of San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and British Psycho-Analytical Society, andEmeritus Tavistock Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the University of London, UCL.

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818 R. PETER HOBSON

STRUCTURES OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

By way of introduction, I need to make a point about the biological underpinnings of socialexperience. The point is simple: One experiences other people in ways that are special to people,and does so from early in life on the basis of biologically given predispositions. The challenge isto characterize quite how such experience is structured, and to trace what follows for cognitiveas well as social development.

Already, this position carries an important implication. If certain humans were to have adifferent biological constitution, then they might experience people—and organize their mindsin relation to personal experience—in ways that are unlike those to which one is accustomed.To give this general statement more specific psychoanalytic grounding, the claim that object rela-tional structures of mind are deeply ingrained, and that they shape social experience from theearliest months of life, is a claim about a contingent fact of human psychology. Things could beotherwise. It would seem to be a corollary of such a view that there might be particular humanbeings who come into the world without the biological constitution to fully register, apprehend,and represent people in an object relational way. I shall come to consider early childhood autismfrom this perspective, not so much to dwell on autism, but rather, to examine what the conditionreveals about typical development.

Now, of course, the nature and development of social experience among infants andyoung children are matters close to the heart of psychoanalysts. There is a rich tradition ofpsychoanalytic writing (e.g., Isaacs, 1948; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1973; Spitz, 1965;Stern, 1985) that has conjoined observational data from infants and toddlers with psychoanalyticresearch of typically developing and troubled children, adolescents, and adults, to yield accountsthat aim to encompass the richness and organization of infants’ early social relations. Instead ofdwelling on important contrasts among rival theories, I restrict myself to themes that are of cen-tral importance for this article. In particular, I consider a small set of empirical nonpsychoanalyticstudies that point to potentially significant forms self-other connectedness and differentiation inearly human social relations and communication.

Yet before I do so, it would be reasonable to ask: Why focus on self-other relations in humaninfancy, when this article is supposed to be tackling the making of mind from an evolutionaryperspective? The reason is as follows: I suggest that a small but profound shift in the biologicalstructuring of social relations and social experience holds the key to understanding how certainprimates came to develop intellectual powers that are distinctively human. I am not suggest-ing that, in this respect, ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. By this point in the evolutionof the species, humans have acquired additional biological substrates for what began as social-dependent faculties, for instance in relation to certain language abilities. Yet if one considers thedevelopment of human infants, one can discern how far specific forms of social experience—forms that are special to humans—continue to underpin and promote not only sophisticatedmodes of relatedness and communication, but also aspects of creative communication andsymbolic thinking.

What follows is intended to illustrate some critical features of this developmental story.Although some might question whether what I describe of the earliest phases of infancy arereally so unique to the human species, I strongly suspect that here one can uncover foundationsfor quintessentially human forms of sharing that emerge later on, toward the end of an infant’sfirst year of life.

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THE MAKING OF MIND 819

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY INTERSUBJECTIVITY

An observer who watches a two-month-old infant relating to his or her caregiver is likely to bestruck by the fluid interweaving of each participant’s facial expressions, vocalizations, and ges-tures within coordinated interpersonal exchanges (Trevarthen, 1979). Perhaps the most tellingdemonstration that a dyadic system is in play, is when a perturbation is introduced to disruptsuch mutual relatedness (e.g., Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). Consider the following descrip-tion of a typically developing two-month-old videotaped during a still-face procedure (originallydevised by Tronick et al., 1978; Cohn and Tronick, 1983). When the mother assumed the still-face and unreactive posture as requested, the infant responded by becoming uneasy, restless, andjerky in her movements, and lost the infectious smiling and smooth tonguing movements thathad been evident just moments before. Her bright, protracted gazes into her mother’s eyes weretransformed into brief, checking glances. More important for the present purposes, after about40 seconds her behavior changed again, and she began to give longer looks to her mother accom-panied by forced smiles. There was a strong impression that she was making bids to reestablishcontact with her mother, trying to elicit a resumption of the joyful interpersonal exchange thatwas now missing.

These observations illustrate how the infant participates in experience with another person.Sharing experience with someone else is not merely like having one’s own experience of theworld, and then adding something. It is more like having one’s own subjective state and regis-tering something of the other’s attitudes conjointly, in a qualitatively new form of experience(Tronick et al., 1978).

Already, by the second month of life, therefore, an infant relates to another embodied per-son. The infant I have just described directed her gaze and forced smiles toward the face of hermother in an effort to restart the lapsed exchanges, just as other infants look away from the still-faced caregiver (especially if the mother has borderline personality disorder; Crandell, Patrick,and Hobson, 2003), in such a way as to seek fulfilling social engagement or to curtail aversiveinterpersonal relatedness. Here it seems that within an infant’s social experience, the state of theother (or to be more circumspect, what the infant perceives in the expressiveness of the other)has a profound effect on the infant’s own state. The infant appears to seek states of affairs inwhich another person’s emotional engagement dovetails with the infant’s own, and avoid statesof relatedness where there is a failure to connect. It does not seem far-fetched to describe thisin terms of the infant’s experience of the other’s bodily-expressed subjective state, as the infantexperiences this through (and, it would seem, in) the embodied other.

Then, toward the end of the first year of life, there is a watershed in the development of theinfant’s capacity to identify with the attitudes of someone else. Now the infant engages in newforms of joint attention and social referencing (e.g., Bretherton, McNew, and Beeghly-Smith,1981; Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello, 1998; Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). For example, col-leagues and I videotaped a 13-month-old girl seated across a table from an adult tester. Aftera period playing together, the tester secured the child’s gaze to her face and then looked toher right while extending her right arm and finger into a point and exclaiming, “Look at that.”Initially, the child’s gaze lingered on the tester’s outstretched hand, then returned to the tester’sface as if to ascertain what the latter might be trying to communicate. For a moment she dwelton her face, then suddenly shifted her gaze to a target beyond the tester’s still outstretched finger.This illustrates something about the means by which infants achieve shared reference by theirpsychological movement through the other. It is not simply that the other’s point or gaze or other

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820 R. PETER HOBSON

gesture serves as a signpost to objects and events in the world. It is also that the infant is drawninto alignment with the other’s orientation toward a shared world.

In a second videotaped interaction, a 12-month-old girl swiftly followed the tester’s gaze andoutstretched finger to locate a poster on the wall and then, giving herself barely enough timeto take in the contents of the poster, quickly looked back to the tester’s face with an engagingsmile. The tester spontaneously commented on this sharing, with a playful and affirming “Didyou see Big Bird?” and the child immediately turned, still smiling, to look back at the poster.Often, sharing attention involves more than being reorientated to see what another person sees.It means registering and sharing that sharing is going on.

Moreover, and importantly, an infant’s attitude to objects and events in the world may bealtered through the infant’s appraisal of the attitudes of another person. When an infant is con-fronted with an emotionally ambiguous object or event, the infant is likely to look and thenrespond to the affective expression of a parent, as this has directedness to the object or event inquestion (Walden and Ogan, 1988). In one well-known early study of such social referencing(Sorce et al., 1985), what seemed like a cliff prevented the child reaching a goal. The majority of12-month-olds who perceived that their mothers were looking to the cliff with smiles tentativelyproceeded toward their goal, whereas none of those who witnessed their mothers showing feartoward the cliff did so. The cliff became an object of fear, through the mother’s attitude towardthis specific part of the environment.

What all this indicates is that by the end of the first year of life, not only does the typicallydeveloping infant experience self and other as distinct and potentially separable sources of atti-tudes toward the world, but the infant can also link in with, and at times assume, such attitudesfor himself or herself. I do not think this justifies the claim that infants of this age have a con-ceptual understanding of another person’s subjective orientation. Rather, the infant is endowedwith a noninferential, affectively grounded responsiveness structured in terms of self-otherrelations.

Such responsiveness provides the foundations for the acquisition of conceptual understandingover the coming months of life. As a child moves out of infancy in the middle of the second year,he or she comes to think about self and other as separate individuals who have their own takes onthe world. At this age, toddlers come to make self-descriptive utterances such as “my book” or“Mary eat” (Kagan, 1982, p. 371), they show abilities to comply and co-operate with others, andthey engage in coordinated role-responsive interactions (e.g., Kaler and Kopp, 1990). Hoffman(1984) tells the story of how Marcy, a girl of 20 months, drew her sister away from playing witha toy she wanted by climbing up on her sister’s favourite horse and crying: “Nice horsey! Nicehorsey!” (p. 109). Such more-or-less explicit forms of emotional understanding, role-taking, andself-reflective awareness (Zahn-Waxler et al, 1992), together with a capacity to symbolize in play(R. P. Hobson, 2000; Lewis and Ramsay, 2004), appear to emerge hand-in-hand from around themiddle of the second year of life.

I stress how the ability to apprehend, respond to, and be moved by the subjective states ofother people in relation to the world, is that such movements create mental space for nego-tiating attitudes and meanings. It is only once an infant has experience of shifting acrossperson-anchored stances through assimilating another person’s attitudes—but at the same time,registering the source of those attitudes as other—that it becomes possible for the infant toachieve understanding of what it means to have alternative perspectives.

Understanding what it means to have a perspective is part of achieving a conceptual grasp ofthe relation between selves and the world. The very idea of a self is that each person is a self

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THE MAKING OF MIND 821

with his or her own take on the world, a take that may be shared or challenged, aligned with, orrepudiated. As G. H. Mead (1934) emphasized, this not only involves taking the role of the otherin communicative exchanges, but also is critical for the capacity knowingly to introduce newmeanings/perspectives on to the materials of symbolic play. If I make this box a pretend-bed, Iknowingly apply bed meanings to something that yields up its identity for the purposes of play.So by the middle of the second year of life, already established prereflective and intuitive formsof role-taking based on identifying-with are yielding both the means to conceptualize (symbols),and contents to conceptualize selves-with-attitudes in relation to a world that is the focus ofattitudes and co-reference.

To recap: initially, by at least two months of age, there is dyadic engagement. Then there isengagement with others’ engagement with the world, through which infants may be moved inattitudes toward the world (as in social referencing). Out of such nonconceptually mediated role-taking emerges the propensity to move within one’s own mind from one psychological orientationto another, as if from one person’s stance to another’s.

According to this account, it is in the propensity to dwell in the experience of the other, andto experience the world through the other—that is, to identify with the attitudes of another per-son from the stance of the other—that the specialness of human forms of sharing are grounded.By relating to other people’s attitudes to the world, a toddler is lifted out of her own one-track way of apprehending objects and events, and is moved to adopt different perspectives(R. P. Hobson, 1990). What follows for cognitive and linguistic development was anticipatedby Vygotsky (1978), who wrote:

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, andlater, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child(intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the for-mation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.[Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 56–57]

EVOLUTIONARY CONSIDERATIONS

There are two arguments to be made before a story about the development of thinking in infancyhas deep implications for a story about the evolution of the mind. If the thesis is that the evo-lution of Homo sapiens diverged from that of nonhuman primate kin through some seeminglyminor but momentous alteration in the mental equipment for social engagement, then one needsto be persuaded that manifestations of such a change do distinguish human beings. Second, peo-ple need evidence that the alteration in question is, indeed, so far-reaching in its developmentalimplications.

With regard to the first of these issues, disputes continue (and will forever continue) overquite what nonhuman primates can do. Thus far, I have cited grounds for supposing that cer-tain abilities shown by human beings towards and beyond the end of infancy—human forms ofsocial referencing, sharing forms of joint attention, context-sensitive and speech-role-responsivelanguage, creative imaginative play, self-reflective awareness, and concern for others—may beat least partly dependent on the propensity to identify with the attitudes of others. This con-stitutes my list of species-unique psychological faculties, although as such it provides only a

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822 R. PETER HOBSON

starting-point for considering all the cultural and institutional structures that the collective humanmind has evolved. But is it justifiable to claim that these features of social and imaginative lifeare distinctive to humans?

Chimpanzees, like typically developing infants (and young children with autism, come to that)enjoy rough-and-tumble play with grown-ups. But there is a quality of interpersonal engagement,what phenomenologists have called dwelling in the experiences of the other person, that appearsto be distinctive to humankind. From a less subjective viewpoint, chimpanzees rarely, if ever,show an object to other chimpanzees, simply for the sake of sharing the experience of the object(e.g., Tomasello and Carpenter, 2005). When human infants do this, showing seems to expressthe young child’s engagement with the other person’s bodily-expressed attitude to the object, orperhaps more accurately, to the object-as-shown-by-the-child. It is not just that the child usesother people to find out about the world, but also that she uses the world to explore relationswith other people. There is something about the emotional investment in the other’s attitude—something also reflected in acts of empathy and concern, and so-called self-conscious emotionsin which toddlers appear to take attitudes toward themselves as if from an outside perspective ofsomeone else—that marks out humans.

It may be objected that chimpanzees show social referencing. Indeed, they are very sensitiveto the ways in which their fellow chimpanzees show interest in potentially valuable or dangerousobjects and events in the environment. However, their focus of interest is in the environment, andthe conspecific is used as an indicator or signpost of what the environment might hold. By con-trast, human infants are invested in the other person who expresses attitudes. Hence the sharingforms of joint attention is rarely seen in chimpanzees. This is critical for the developmental story,because it is supposed that in the human but not in the chimpanzee case, the perceiver registers themeaning of the environment from the other individual’s stance as an outside but identifiable-withorientation. It is in this sense of being moved to the stance of the other, that the critical differencearises.

What about descriptions of nonhuman primates showing concern (e.g., the bonobo Kanzi, asdescribed by Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor, 1998; and O’Connell, 1995, for a review)and limited forms of altruistic helping (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006)? Here I offer just onecomment, beyond making the obvious point that there are various qualities and degrees of con-cern. This is that, almost certainly, different forms of concern have different evolutionary sources.For instance, concern for offspring may well be an expression of attachment processes that arepartly separable from the kinds of intersubjective engagement needed for empathic engagement(compare the case of jealousy, R. P. Hobson et al., 2006). This means it is very difficult to establishwhether or not nonhuman primates are prone to experience and show feelings for conspecifics inthe ways that are so closely bound up with identification.

Then, of course, there is the matter of linguistic communication and creative symbolic play.Although it would be wrong to claim that all forms of language and symbolic functioning arebeyond the reach of chimpanzees when given skilful and intensive human input (e.g., Parker andGibson, 1990), clearly their abilities are limited in these respects. When an adult human usesa word to designate something—and the something may be actions in the past and future, notmerely things or events that are present—the child interprets these in terms of what makes sense,and what the adult may be trying to communicate, from the adult’s point of view. But when achimpanzee sees a human being trying to indicate the location of a desired object by pointingor other indicative action (for instance, placing an object on the location with meaningful looks

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THE MAKING OF MIND 823

toward the chimpanzee), the chimpanzee fails to interpret this as a communication intended foritself (Tomasello, Call, and Gluckman, 1997). It is also important that, for humans, the impor-tance given to how they should do things (including using words) and to complying with normsseems grounded in awareness of the world held in common with others.

The second issue concerns the importance or otherwise of identifying-with for human devel-opment. Could this determinant of interpersonal engagement really be so significant for the rangeof mental functions that characterize our species?

At this point, I make a knight’s move, and rather than argue from the typical case (e.g., Lock,1999, for how deeply language is embedded in social relatedness and constructed through socialscaffolding), I turn to the case of autism. Although considerations from autism will not provedecisive for the argument, this may show that by tracing the developmental implications of anearly and profound limitation in identifying with others, one may uncover tentative support forthe account I have been giving.

THE CASE OF AUTISM

Autism is a syndrome, that is, a constellation of clinical features that happen to cooccur. Mostimportant, these features include a particular kind of limitation in interpersonal engagement andrestrictions in the flexible, context-sensitive use of language and creative symbolic play (Kanner,1943). It is striking that in autism, a cluster of relatively specific psychological abilities thatappear to be distinctive to Homo sapiens are compromised.

To oversimplify, I believe that children with autism have a diminished propensity to iden-tify with the attitudes of others. Mostly but not entirely, in my view, the remaining features ofautism—including abnormalities in language, thought, and symbolic play—stem from this pri-mary interpersonal deficit (R. P. Hobson, 1993, 2002). Therefore, through careful observationand study of children with autism, one may discern how identifying-with transforms and enrichesboth social experience and understanding and cognitive-linguistic development.

What is the evidence for this claim? First, there need to be reasons for believing that individ-uals with autism show a relative lack of identification with other people. Here I cite diverse linesof evidence from studies conducted by my own research group. When compared with carefullymatched children without autism, those with autism: (a) copy the goal and strategy of observedactions, but mostly fail to identify with the style and self-orientation with which the model enactsthose actions (R. P. Hobson and Lee, 1999; R. P. Hobson and Hobson, 2008); (b) tend not toidentify with self- and other-oriented actions when communicating, for example in failing topoint-to-own-body when communicating to someone else where she should place a sticker onher own body (J. A. Hobson and Hobson, 2007; R. P. Hobson and Meyer, 2005; Meyer andHobson, 2004); (c) display diminished role-shifting and other features of identifying-with some-one engaged in a communication game (R. P. Hobson, Lee, and Hobson, 2007), (d) are limitedin linguistic role-taking when providing narratives (García-Pérez, Hobson, and Lee, 2008), andwhen using personal pronouns (Lee, Hobson, and Chiat, 1994; R. P. Hobson, Lee, and Hobson,2009) and other deictic terms (R. P. Hobson, García-Pérez, and Lee, 2009); and (e) according toparental report, as well as observations in semistructured settings, manifest certain complex emo-tions such as jealousy but are atypical in being unlikely to express those attitudes (e.g., concern,guilt) that require them to respond to other people’s feelings as being anchored in someone else

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824 R. PETER HOBSON

(R. P. Hobson et al., 2006; J. A. Hobson, Harris, García-Pérez, and Hobson, 2009). In addition,they show the kinds of impairment in intersubjectivity (García-Pérez, Lee, and Hobson, 2007)and social referencing (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, and Yirmiya, 1992) that one would expect if theywere limited in the capacity to identify with others.

Second, there needs to be evidence that limitations in identifying-with may explain a rangeof disabilities that characterize autism. Here I restrict myself to two illustrative studies. Thefirst comes from research on verbal dialogue in conversations. Colleagues and I (R. P. Hobson,Hobson, García-Pérez, and Du Bois, 2012) found that even within a group of participants withautism, a child’s sensitivity to a conversational partner’s intended meanings was correlatedwith independent measures of affective engagement between the two conversing individuals.Moreover, an analysis of the conversations, utterance by utterance, revealed that participants withautism were not different from nonautistic participants in their tendency to pick up some elementsof language from the conversational partner, but they were less able to build on these in a coherentway. This accorded with our prediction that they would be less able to assimilate meanings fromthe conversational partner (a hallmark of identification) and use these as a launching-pad for theirown subsequent speech. Once one appreciates how far the acquisition of language is dependenton the kinds of role-taking and sharing of perspectives underpinned by identifying-with, manyof the specific linguistic deficits of children with autism (e.g, echolalia, confusions in the use ofpersonal pronouns, idiosyncratic word usage) become comprehensible (e.g. Bosch, 1970; Fay,1979; Hobson, 2012a; Lee et al., 1994).

The second example concerns symbolic play. R. P. Hobson, Lee, and Hobson (2008) testedtwo matched groups of able children with and without autism, aged between seven and 14 yearsand with verbal mental ages between two and 10 years. The groups were similar in their flexibleuse of play materials, and even their ability to make one thing stand for another. On the otherhand, there was indication that the process through which this was achieved was different amongparticipants with autism. These children were rated as showing less fun, less investment in thematerials of play, and less creativity. It was even possible to achieve interrater reliabilities injudgments of the children’s awareness of themselves as creating new meanings, and here, too,the children with autism scored less highly.

The point of interest is that there was a relation between the quality of children’s impoverishedengagement with others’ attitudes toward the world (including toward the world of play), and thequality of the children’s attitudes to their own alternative takes on the world and their engagementin playful symbolizing. If in typical development, the interpersonal playfulness of play, the joy ofsharing and coordinating attitudes with others, is carried into the theater of the individual’s ownmind from interpersonal engagement, then no wonder if impoverishment in such engagementleads to restriction in creative play.

It is important to appreciate that the capacity to identify with others is not completely absentin many individuals with autism, a fact well illustrated in many of our own studies. Therefore,it would be too crude to suppose a weakness of identifying-with should completely prevent theemergence of language, symbolic play and so on among individuals with autism. What wouldbe expected is more or less what one observes, namely specific limitations and patchiness injust those domains of mental functioning over which identifying-with has a specially power-ful influence. From a complementary perspective, evidence from autism suggests just how faridentifying-with influences the course of early human development.

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THE MAKING OF MIND 825

IDENTIFYING-WITH

My thesis, then, is that what led to the rapid development of human language and creative sym-bolic functioning was a small but vital tweak in humanity’s ancestors’ capacity to engage withthe attitudes of their conspecifics. They came to identify with others. In some respects, thismight seem an insignificant advance, given that some nonhuman primates show certain formsof imitation, social engagement, and even (when they are enculturated) symbol use. Yet onceindividuals have developed enough non-conceptually mediated role-taking such that each indi-vidual both grips and is gripped by the attitudes of others, then new forms of shared endeavour,communication, creativity, thought, and culture follow it the wake.

As Papineau (2003, pp. 181–182) stated: “Any distinctively human capacities would have tobe ones that could plausibly have evolved within the last 5 million years. Equally importantly,they would have had to be ones that natural selection could advantageously have added at eachstage to what was already there.” One consideration in favor of the account I have given, is thatit provides an answer to the question: What small change in psychological ability might have sorapidly led to so substantial and wide-ranging developments in primate mentality?

There is a complication here. In what I have just said, I have pointed to a shift in the trajec-tory of evolution. But ontogeny does not simply recapitulate phylogeny. For example, evolutionitself capitalizes on the potential to fix predispositions that facilitate the acquisition of emergentproperties. Genes can be selected if they predispose an organism to learn things in ways thatbring selective advantage, or more broadly, to acquire advantageous traits. I am suggesting thatidentifying-with does just that. It provides a mechanism that facilitates cognitive development(through changing the very means to learning), as well as social collaboration, in a manner thatcould have promoted the rapid evolution of culture. Then by what is called the Baldwin effect,some linguistic-cognitive advances that initially depended on environmental input could havebeen brought under a degree of genetic control, so that now there may be features of (say) lan-guage for which there is genetic priming. Therefore, even if it is true that (along with othercapacities, of course) the capacity to identify-with was necessary to progress along the pathto language and so much else, this does not mean it has exactly the same role or importancefor modern-day humans. There may be biologically prepared mechanisms that have evolved toaugment and supplement the relational propensities I have highlighted. Now some aspects of lan-guage and cognition may develop relatively independently of social experience. This is anotherreason why it would be too crude to suppose that a weakness in identifying-with should com-pletely prevent the emergence of language, symbolic play, and so on among individuals withautism.

SOME PSYCHOANALYTIC CONSIDERATIONS

The notion of identifying-with comes from psychoanalysis. The definition provided by Laplancheand Pontalis (1973, p. 205) is a good place to start: “psychological process whereby the sub-ject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly orpartially, after the model the other provides.” Through the process of identifying with others’bodily expressed emotional attitudes, for example, an individual perceives and assimilates the

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826 R. PETER HOBSON

attitudes as other-person-centred, in such a way that they become possibilities for the person’sown relations with the world, including the individual’s relations towards himself or herself.

A complication is that the very nature of identification changes with development. AlthoughFreud (1921) illustrated the notion with a cognitively elaborated instance, namely a boy’s wishto be like his father, he concluded his brief essay on identification with a footnote in which hemade the following claim: “A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy,that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take upany attitude at all towards another mental life” (Freud, 1921, p.110). Clearly, this refers to amuch more basic level of identifying-with, but one for which it remains true that “identificationis not simple imitation but assimilation ” (Freud, 1900, p. 150, italics in original). The process ofidentifying-with has its own developmental course.

The critical issue for the making of mind is that once an organism identifies with the attitudesof conspecifics, then the way is open for an internal world of object relations to develop. A longtradition of writers beginning with Freud (1917) and continuing with, for example, Isaacs (1948),Fairbairn (1946), and Ogden (1983), have dwelt on how human minds operate like a theatercomprising a cast of human or quasi-human figures in relation to one another. My point is thatthe operation of identifying-with is what creates these internal objects, as well as a person’spropensity to become identified with some of the figures in relation to others.

Consider one especially important feature of the developmental story. The process ofidentifying-with entails that experience is structured with a boundary between self and other.This means that there is scope for alteration in the distribution or partitioning of emotional statesacross that boundary. For instance, the process of projective identification can effect a transfor-mation of an individual’s experience so that certain feelings are located in the other-centred partof a dyadic exchange. Of course, this does not completely rid the person of those feelings, butit does alter his or her experience both of self and other. This may be an alteration that is tran-sient and easily reversed, or may become established as a relatively enduring characteristic of aperson’s emotional landscape.

If all this is the case, then the evolutionary shift I have described not only results in new formsof role-taking that have profound implications for the development of language and thought, butit also leads to revolutionary changes in the development of human beings’ internal world andwith this, a radical reconfiguration of their emotional experience. If this is the case, one mightexpect that individuals who have a weak or limited capacity for identifying-with should alsohave an ill-organized and perhaps fragile object relational structure to their internal world. Thiscaptures what several psychoanalysts have struggled to describe in children with autism (e.g.,Meltzer et al., 1975; see R. P. Hobson, 2012b).

It may be worth making a final point about the object relational structure of social experi-ence, drawing on phenomenology. Writing on the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi (2010,p. 163) wrote:

Since intersubjectivity is in fact possible, there must exist a bridge between my self-acquaintance andmy acquaintance with others; my experience of my own subjectivity must contain an anticipationof the other, must contain the seeds of alterity . . . . Thus, Merleau-Ponty can describe embodiedself-awareness as a presentiment of the other.

What this means is that, for all the attention one should give to someone’s experience inactual face-to-face interpersonal encounters, one should also consider what the individual—and

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THE MAKING OF MIND 827

from a developmental perspective, the individual in question may be an infant—brings to suchencounters to give self-other structure to such experience (also Bråten, 1998, on the virtual other).In virtue of the structure of the process of identifying-with, certain emotions entail an expectationand/or experience of otherness, that is, an intrinsically object relational character. This is founda-tional for social experience, and at the same time sets the stage for social experience to shape theself. What results is a mind that is comprised of parts of the self in various states of relatednessto each other, and to various degrees felt to be central to or alienated from self-experience.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

In a recent and lucid brief review entitled “Ape and human cognition: What’s the difference?,”Tomasello and Herrmann (2010, p. 7) suggested that among the important questions for futureresearch, are the following: “How precisely do children’s skills of collaboration and imitativelearning differ from those of other great apes?” and “What are the differences in motivation andemotion that contribute to humans’ special cooperative tendencies and skills?”

According to the account presented here, these questions will need to be reframed in at leasttwo respects. First, it is not clear that the notion of skills is appropriate to capture what is specialabout human collaboration and imitation. What matters is the kind of self-other engagement thatmakes being-with and doing-with so special a part of human life. For example, imitating in humanbeings extends far beyond copying actions, not least when one person imitates-plus-assimilatessomeone else’s attitudes and is transformed in the process.

Second, in keeping with mainstream psychological theorizing, Tomasello not only segregatesskills (and other cognitive abilities) from other mental functions, but he also divides motivationand emotion. Yet, as I have discussed elsewhere (R. P. Hobson, 2008), it may be inappropriate todivvy up the mind in this way when characterizing early and basic forms of relatedness betweenhumans and the world. Identifying-with exemplifies a process that has cognitive, conative andaffective aspects, not components. To identify with someone else is to be engaged with themaffectively, it is to be motivated to feel and behave in certain ways, and it is to apply cognitivecategories of relevant kinds (for instance, in leading to different relations towards persons andthings). So perhaps what one needs to appreciate is that the differences between human andnonhuman primates may be at once cognitive, motivational, and affective, for the very reasonthat (at least in large part) these facets of mental functioning reflect a difference in a single,underlying process that has each of these qualities as aspects of its nature.

In summary, the emergence of a process of identifying-with seems to constitute a watershedin the making of mind. As widely accepted in the psychoanalytic community, there is self-otherstructure to interpersonal experience. From the earliest phases in life, human infants displaythe capacity and propensity for increasingly differentiated forms of identification. I have beensuggesting that as development proceeds, this capacity finds expression in social referencing,coreferential communication, the emergence of conceptual self/other awareness, and, in duecourse, increasingly deep understandings of oneself and others as minded beings. Beyond this,it structures the creation of an internal world. Identifying-with is not the be all and end all ofdevelopment, of course, but in phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic perspective, it plays a criticalrole in the making of mind.

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