How We Became Human

Julio Moreno, MD, PhD, is a faculty member at Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association’s Psychoanalytic Institute, the School of Psychology at Buenos Aires University, and the University of Hospital Italiano. His previous works include Tiempo y trauma: Continuidades rotas, and La infancia y sus bordes: Desafíos para el psicoanálisis.

This English translation of Moreno's idiosyncratic and demanding reading of what it means to be human, originally published in Spanish in 2002, will repay the Anglophone who makes the effort to follow its multiple trajectories of thinking. A psychoanalyst based in Argentina, Moreno covers an impressive terrain of ideas, all tied. . . .to the question of how humanness differs from animalness and how humans' understandings of their world are, in the end, faulty. Ranging across the disciplines of psychology, biology, philosophy, anthropology, and physics, Moreno situates the strengths and deficiencies of Freudian metapsychology. Students of psychoanalysis and psychology, especially those interested in problems related to child analysis and treatment, will find this book rewarding. Not a book easily compared with others, Moreno's speculative treatment of what is human about humans is an important contribution to the more generally defined, and growing, turn back to humanism. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals.

• AcknowledgmentsPrefaceChapter 1: HumannessChapter 2: Virtual RealityChapter 3: Connection and AssociationChapter 4: The Link I: TheoryChapter 5: The Link II: ManifestationsChapter 6: BeliefChapter 7. ChildishnessChapter 8: Childishness II: The History of Childhood and ToysChapter 9: The Emergence of HumannessChapter 10: The Biological History of the Parent-Child Link: Childrearing StrategiesReferencesIndexAbout the Author