Kenneth Kaye

Kenneth Kaye (January 24, 1946 – May 26, 2021[1]) was an American psychologist and writer 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.

[2] Beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing through the University of Chicago years, 22 of Kaye's published articles[3] 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?

[6][7][8] Specifically, he traced the development of turn-taking beginning with instinctive maternal responses to physiological/neurological bursts and pauses in neonatal activity,[9] through transactions in which adults adjust to babies' perceived (projected) intentions,[10] to true dialogue which makes symbolic language possible.

Kaye's innovative microanalytic studies of parent-infant interaction in the 1970s have been discussed continuously to the present in hundreds of scholarly papers and books on diverse psychological topics.