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Appendix: Intersubjectivity and Attachment: Theory and Science
The Appendix provides evidence-rich evaluations of two well-known theories of infant sociability which blinker appreciation of groupness in infants. It first evaluates evidence for claims that babies are born with a capacity for one-to-one mind-reading or ‘innate intersubjectivity’: through pre-speech ‘conversational’ behaviour; a capacity to distinguish people from things; the mirror-role of adults in infant-adult ‘conversations’; and ‘perturbation’ experiments. The available evidence accords better with babies’ orientation towards their worlds being governed by a form of narcissism or ‘primary process’ than by an inborn capacity for mind-reading. Part Two of the appendix deals with the attachment perspective, summarising the evidence which refutes the claim that babies spend their first two years of life constructing an ‘attachment behavioural system’ – with a mother-figure as set-goal – which serves as the foundation for later socio-emotional development. Attachment research is shown to reflect a culture-specific theory of adult caregiving, not a biological theory of infant sociability.