The Child as a Sense Organ: An Anthroposophic Understanding of Imitation Processes, Paperback/Peter Selg

The initial period of childhood is essentially about adapting to and incarnating on Earth and establishing a provisional balance between the ``spiritual`` and the ``physical,`` between the prenatal cosmic and the earthly factors. During this time, according to Rudolf Steiner, ``all the forces of a child's organization emanate from the neurosensory system. . . . By bringing respiration into harmony with neurosensory activity, we draw the spirit-soul element into the child's physical life.`` Peter Selg investigates how children's early experience of the world begins as an undifferentiated sensory relationship to their phenomenological environment. This aspect of a child's incarnation leads to leaning through imitation and to the process of recognizing ``the Other`` as a separate entity with which to interact. In this cogent work, Peter Selg describes the early stages of childhood from the perspectives of conventional scientific and spiritual-scientific-- anthropological and anthroposophic--research with the purpose of encouraging a new educational attitude in working with young children. In his numerous references to early childhood development, this was Rudolf Steiner's most important and urgent purpose.