ABSTRACT
OVERVIEW Our aim in this chapter is to articulate a relational perspective on processes of early development. From an empirical standpoint, we shall adopt the approach of developmental psychopathology and consider how evidence from research in autism serves to illuminate the structure of early interpersonal relatedness. From a theoretical standpoint, we shall take the position that a theory of psychological development needs to begin by characterizing the forms of relatedness that exist between an infant and the social and nonsocial world, and proceed to account for progressively elaborated understandings that the infant and young child acquires about self and other as persons who exist in relation to a shared environment. It is in conjunction with explicit understanding of persons and selves, we shall argue, that children also acquire the conceptual distinction between thoughts (or more basically, attitudes) and things. The reason is that to conceive of oneself as a self among other selves is also to comprehend how given objects and events fall under different descriptions-for-persons. As one aspect of this story, what commences as an essentially cognitive and conative and affective business of relating to other people and the world, becomes partly recon gured so that to some degree (but never completely), thinking is emancipated from the immediate exigencies of feeling and will.
