Philippe Rochat: "Early Embodied Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity"

Philippe Rochat from Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, will be visiting the CFS from May 10-30, 2009. He will be giving a guest lecture May 26. 

"I would like to re-visit the assertion that babies are born in a state of dualism between self and world, an assertion claimed and presumably supported by the recent wave of infancy research, an assertion defying the 'blooming, buzzing, confusion' of the neonate proposed over a century ago by William James, and in his footsteps, by pioneer developmental psychologists like Baldwin, Piaget, or Wallon, notwithstanding Freud, Klein, or Marler in the realm of psychoanalysis. I will develop the idea that new evidence of early synesthesia and neuronal mirror systems possibly associated with newborns' experience of being in the world would suggest that William James , after all, was not that confused and off the mark. We might indeed be born with capacities to experience fusion with the world, whether physical or social, hence the title of my talk." - Philippe Rochat