Author of the week: Alison Gopnik

last updated 8 January 2015

Alison Gopnik thinks Sigmund Freud didn’t know the first thing about how the human mind developed, said Anthony Gottleib in The New York Times. In her wry new book, The Philosophical Baby, the Berkeley professor shows how new insights into infant thought processes shed light on the origins of consciousness, morality, and love. And she argues that we ought to have been studying children for clues decades ago. Instead, male thinkers like Freud assumed children simply weren’t interesting. Yet any mother knows, she says, that little minds are frequently more “surprising, unpredictable, and fascinating” than adult ones.

Herself a mother of three, Gopnik sees her book as an alternative to self-help schlock that preys on parents’ insecurities, said Tamara Straus in the San Francisco Chronicle. “We know what makes babies smart and happy and thrive,” Gopnik says. “It’s having human beings who are dedicated to caring for them—human beings who are well supported, not stressed out, and not poor.” Parents need to stop blaming themselves—and each other. Her next book, she says, will call for a truce in the “mommy wars” between working and stay-at-home moms. “It’s just a terrible discourse,” she says, “to have around one of the most profound, satisfying, deep, spiritually significant activities that human beings ever engage in.”