Developing Through Relationships

Book excerpt: The purpose of this outstanding new book is to explain how individuals develop through their relationships with others. Alan Fogel demonstrates that creativity is at the heart human development, arising out of a social dynamic process called co-regulation. He focuses on the act of communication - between adults, between parents and children, among non-human animals, even among cells and genes - to create an original model of human development. Fogel weaves together theory and empirical findings from a variety of disciplines - linguistics, biology, literature, cognitive and neural science, ethology, anthropology, and psychology - to demonstrate the continuous process model of communication. He contends that the human mind and sense of self must be seen as developing out of the processes of communication and relationship-formation between the subject and other individuals. Rarely has a work of scholarship so elegantly and so persuasively presented a complex psychological theory and its practical application. Developing through Relationships not only makes a substantial contribution to developmental psychology but also to the fields of communication, cognitive science, linguistics, and biology.