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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Autism demystified, 26 Nov 2002
It was when our son refused to wave bye-bye that we began to realise something was wrong. Waving reveals a capacity to be affected by and respond to the action of another person. One of the most basic acts of imitation, it shows that an infant is becoming aware of the distinction between himself and others. As we - and many other parents - have discovered, the failure to wave bye-bye is an ominous early sign of autism.Imitation - interacting at an emotional level - is, as Peter Hobson points out in this remarkable book, crucial to the development of thought and language. His great achievement is to explain this development as a process that depends on emotional engagement between infant and parent. He also clarifies how the diverse features of autism arise from a basic failure of emotional connectedness. Peter Hobson, an experimental clinical psychologist and a psychotherapist, focuses on the social dimension of infant development - and its deficit in autism. This is the great strength of his approach, particularly given the neglect of interpersonal factors in current fashions for neurological, biochemical and autoimmune theories. The Cradle of Thought brings together insights from studies of autistic and non-autistic children, of children of mothers with psychiatric problems, of children with congenital blindness and Romanian orphans. It even draws on studies of chimpanzees to clarify the distinctive character of human development. The result is a profound and inspiring book that will be of great interest to families of autistic children. It is a particular pleasure to read a rigorously scientific study of autism that does not even mention PET scans, amino acids or immunoglobulins.
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