The Developing Mind

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

(Guilford Press. 1999.)

This book goes beyond the nature and nurture divisions that traditionally have constrained much of our thinking about development, exploring the role of interpersonal relationships in forging key connections in the brain. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., presents a groundbreaking new way of thinking about the emergence of the human mind and the process by which each of us becomes a feeling, thinking, remembering individual. Illuminating how and why neurobiology matters, this book is essential reading for clinicians, educators, researchers, and students interested in human experience and development across the life span.

Praise:

"Why can't we remember what we did at age three? Why are some children unusually shy? What is the biochemistry of humiliation, and how can it be 'toxic to the developing child's brain'? New and plausible answers to these questions emerge from Siegel's synthesis of neurobiology, research psychology and cognitive science...his subject--how we become the people we are--deserves to hold many readers spellbound."
- Publishers Weekly

"...brilliant....It should probably not be read at one sitting, but sifted slowly as you would a 20 year old port....This is not just a book for bright psychiatric residents or child fellows, but child psychiatrists young and old, over-worked or under-paid. It offers a glimpse of new horizons in the profession, and may be the harbinger of a fresh archetype for child psychiatry as it enters the next millennium."
- The Canadian Child Psychiatry Review

"...fulfilled my wildest expectations. Instead of laboriously struggling to learn about neurobiology, I found myself fairly effortlessly assimilating information because 1) the author is able to present his material in the context of interpersonal relationships in general and the treatment dyad in particular, and 2) the author is a master of lucidity, avoids pedantry, and succeeds in making his data clinically useful."
- American Journal of Psychiatry