Intersubjective Minds

Jonathan Delafield-Butt's work examines the origins of conscious experience and the embodied and emotional foundations of psychological development, with attention to the subtle but significant motor disruption evident in autism spectrum disorder. He took his Ph.D. in Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Edinburgh before extending to Developmental Psychology advancing intersubjectivity theory in postdoctoral work at the Universities of Edinburgh and Copenhagen. He held scholarships at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh for science-philosophy bridgework in the nature of brain-mind relationship. Delafield-Butt trained pre-clinically in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Scottish Institute for Human Relations. He is a member of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, the International Society for Autism Research, and the Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre at Gothenburg. Vasudevi Reddy has been interested in the origins and early development of social cognition, for three decades now, and has been exploring the role of emotional engagement in social understanding. She focuses on everyday, ordinary engagements (such as teasing and joking and showing-off or feeling shy) which often tend to get ignored in mainstream theories. Her interest in engagement as the route to understanding has led her to questions about the nature and influence of culture on social understanding. Her book How Infants Know Minds published by Harvard University Press in 2008 argues for a second-person approach to knowing minds, a dialogical and emotion-based route to an old problem. She is Emeritus Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the UK