Kenneth Kaye

Kenneth Kaye (born January 24, 1946) is an American psychologist, writer, and business consultant whose research, books, and articles connect the fields of human development, family relationships and conflict resolution.

Although spanning several professional disciplines, the substantial body of Kaye’s work is characterized by family systems theory and by a search for observable, reproducible processes rather than stopping at generalizations about formal properties, for example, of stages in mental or social development.

Kaye was educated at Harvard University (A.B. in English and American Literature, 1966; Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and Education, 1970). Following a Visiting Fellowship at Kings College, Cambridge (UK), he taught at the University of Washington (1970–71) and the University of Chicago (Department of Education and Committee on Human Development, 1971–81). From 1982 to 2007 he was an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry, Northwestern University Medical School.

In later years, Kaye published six books of fiction under the name Ken Kaye.

Beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing through the University of Chicago years, 22 of Kaye's published articles addressed the fundamental question, What gives Homo sapiens, uniquely among all other creatures, the ability to learn through imitation, language, and consciousness of a reflecting self? His principal mentors were the social-cognitive psychologist Jerome S. Bruner, British ethologist M.P.M. Richards, and pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Elaborated most fully in his book The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons, Kaye theorized and demonstrated that those distinguishing psychological powers, rather than developing intrinsically from innate capacities of the human infant biologically reorganizing themselves (Piaget), are shaped gradually by interactions due to the co-evolution of infant behavior and human adult behavior. Specifically, he traced the development of turn-taking beginning with instinctive maternal responses to physiological/neurological bursts and pauses in neonatal activity, through transactions in which adults adjust to babies' perceived (projected) intentions, to true dialogue which makes symbolic language possible.

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