Abstract
I present empirical evidence suggesting that an infant first becomes aware of herself as the focal center of a caregiver's attending. Yet that does not account for her awareness of herself as agent. To address this question, I bring in research on neonatal imitation, as well as studies demonstrating the existence of a neural system in which parts of the same brain areas are activated when observing another's action and when executing a similar one. Applying these findings, I consider gestural exchanges between infant and caregiver, such as reciprocal smiles and imitative vocalizations. Lacking self-awareness at first, the infant is unaware of her own agency. By returning her unwitting gesture, the caregiver singles out for her—thanks to neural matching—the gesture's kinesthesis. Moreover, the caregiver's smile, imitative vocalization, or other gesture is the form that focusing takes. The kinesthesis of the infant's gesture, in being singled out, is experienced by the infant as what the caregiver is focusing on. It is experienced as being within the focal center. In this way, the infant becomes aware of herself as a bodily entity acting toward the caregiver. Exchanges that involve matching are at first essential, I argue, in making the infant present to herself in action. Matching will cease to be necessary, but self-awareness continues to depend fundamentally on others until the acquisition of language, when the child becomes capable of talking to herself as if she were the caregiver.
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Notes
Because much of the infancy research I’ll be quoting involves mothers and their infants, to avoid confusion I shall henceforth use feminine pronouns for the caregiver, masculine for the baby.
"Das reziproke Verhältnis von Ich und Du zeigt eine wesenhafte Asymmetrie, weil Ich und Du mir zugleich, aber auf verschiedene Weise gegenwärtig sind. Das ausdrückliche Primat liegt für jeden beim andern, dem er zugewandt ist. Was ich aktuell erlebe, sehe ich nicht, wohl aber, was du aktuell erlebst, mich selbst eingeschlossen. Diese Originalität der Fremdgegenwart verwehrt es uns, das Du als zweites Ich zu deuten. Die ausdrückliche Selbstgegenwart ist vielmehr eine vermittelte; ich verdanke sie dem Andern, erreiche sie freilich nur, wenn ich sie nicht suche. Erkenne ich den Andern an, um selbst Anerkennung zu finden und biege ich den Spannungsbogen zwischen uns auf mich zurück, so verfliegt der Zauber. Ich verliere den Andern und mich selbst; was mir noch bleibt, ist Fertiges, Vergangenes—die Asche des Nachruhms. Der Satz vom Selbstgewinn durch Selbsthingabe ist zunächst ein Lebensgesetz; zu einem moralischen Gebot wird es erst in der Sicht des gestörten Lebens." Unless an English version is cited, translations are mine.
A basic technique is what psychoanalysts call "identification" with a beloved other—i.e., playing her part toward oneself—as a way of hedging against the potential loss of her. Identification commonly takes the form of talking "with oneself" (cf. Wilson and Weinstein 1990). This mitigates the need for the flesh-and-blood person.
The pronouns are admittedly anachronistic, for it will be years before the child masters their use. By the pre-linguistic "You," I shall mean a person perceived as attending to one who through this perception becomes self-aware, an "I."
Concerning the possibility of self-awareness in fetuses and newborns, allow me to defer the discussion until I have presented the dynamic of the You-I event, which appears most clearly beginning in the 2nd month.
I am indebted to Reddy's How infants know minds (2008) for its comprehensive account of infant development from a second-person perspective.
Turati et al. (2008) have determined that in both these views, the identification is based on the abundant and similar perceptual information from the inner face.
Following Husserl, Overgaard (2004, p. 113) conducts a thought-experiment in which, per impossibile, all aspects of the perceived object would be fully manifest, i.e., there would be no horizon containing hidden aspects, no rear sides. Husserl (1973a, pp. 116–117) asks whether, in such a case, there would be a difference between appearance and what appears, and thus whether there would be the transcendence of the object that is determined by that difference. He answers in the negative. Overgaard comments: "Hence a perception of something, of a tree as something 'out there in the garden,' something transcendent in relation to the perceptual experience, is only possible in the way that the 'properly' manifest [i.e., the side that is sensually presented—Author] is embodied in a horizon of not-properly-manifest…." Without such hiddenness, "[t]he experience would seem to absorb the object completely, so that perceived [sic] could not be differentiated from the perceptual experience."
"[A]ccording to Wittgenstein (although he would not put it like this), 'human being' is a fundamental ontological category of its own—one that should be contrasted with lifeless material things as well as Cartesian immaterial things, if there are any" (Overgaard 2007, p. 26). Krueger (2012) defends the idea that there is direct perception of some mental states. He cites empirical evidence suggesting that "some forms of expressive behavior are proper aspects or components of the mental phenomena being perceived. In seeing this behavior, we are seeing parts of another’s mind."
I thank an anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this article by Reddy.
Some take the position that a child does not recognize minded beings, including himself, until he passes the false belief test at 3 or 4 years. For criticism of this view, see Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, pp. 171–192).
Cf. Gallagher (1996): "[P]roprioceptive awareness, on its own, provides an awareness of one's own body but not of one's own body as one's own."
Several researchers dispute the existence of neonatal imitation (Anisfeld 1996; Anisfeld et al. 2001; Jones 2009). They point out that the only gesture which has yielded a strong positive result across groups of neonates is tongue protrusion. This alone does not suffice to prove imitation, because neonates have been seen to protrude their tongues in response to various arousing stimuli: the apparent imitation may have merely been an arousal response. Yet the criticism bypasses a strange fact that requires explanation: On a case-by-case basis, one does find neonates—and not just a few—who make significantly more mouth openings than tongue protrusions when mouth opening is modeled, as well as more tongue protrusions than mouth openings when tongue protrusion is modeled. For neonatal imitation among chimpanzees, see Myowa-Yamakoshi et al. (2004) and Bard (2007).
I shall occasionally parenthesize phrases (e.g., "their own" in this sentence) that may help the reader grasp my meaning, although they are not to be taken as part of the infant's experience prior to the You-I event.
As further evidence of neonatal intermodal capability, Streri and Gentaz (2003) have found that newborns "can visually recognize the shape of an object that they have previously manipulated with their right hand, out of sight."
Much of the research I shall now cite was inspired by the discovery, in macaques, of neurons which discharge both when the macaque performs a motor act and when she observes a similar act performed by another (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008). The research into such "mirror neurons" uses electrodes implanted in the brain, a procedure not normally permitted in work involving humans.
In addition to the sources cited for orofacial imitation, see Field et al. (1982) on the neonatal imitation of happy, sad and surprised expressions.
For research suggesting the existence of an observation/execution matching system in infants, see also Nyström (2008) and Craighero et al. (2011). If infants have mirror neurons, it is likely that these get shaped by experience (Lepage and Théoret 2007). Ferrari et al. (2008) found direct evidence of mirror neurons in 1-week-old macaques; the macaque neonates also imitate (Ferrari et al. 2006; Ferrari et al. 2009).
Concerning adult imitation, Iacoboni et al. (1999; cf. Iacoboni 2009) discovered that when one imitates another while observing her, the amount of activity in certain brain areas approximates the sum of the amount which normally occurs in observation and the amount which normally occurs in execution.
Bigelow (1995) describes the protoconversation of a blind-born 6-week-old and his mother: "The mother was distressed at her baby's unresponsiveness and passivity…. I asked the mother to interact with her child in a way she especially enjoyed. After some hesitation, she took her baby in her arms and rolled gently back and forth on the bed talking softly to him as she repeatedly kissed him on one cheek and then the other. After a few minutes, I asked her to stop in mid-roll. She did, and the baby, who had been inactive during this procedure, slowly turned the other cheek. To the mother's delight, he showed anticipation of the coming kiss and knowledge of their intimate ritual."
When the carer wants to respond to a negative affect like anger or frustration while showing the infant that she does not share it, she need not deliberate how to do so; she does so quite naturally by playfully exaggerating its expression (Fonagy et al. 2002, Ch. 4).
"[T]he two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched and touching to each other" (Merleau-Ponty 2005, p. 106).
Gibson might answer that from birth the infant can move his head and that therefore the following would apply: "[T]he world is revealed and concealed as the head moves, in ways that specify exactly how the head moves" (Gibson 1986, p. 118). But I do not see how the global shifts of the visual field during head motion, along with kinesthesis, can specify an entity that is perceiving them. They amount to shifts in sheer spectacle, but there is nothing in them to specify the infant as an entity existing among the entities in the spectacle. Once the infant is specified as an entity, then indeed the shifts will specify how his head moves. Further, the infant is not capable of smooth visual tracking before the age of 2 months (von Hofsten and Rosander 1997), when the You-I event has already been instituted.
In the case of twins in utero, there is evidence of sensitivity to persons (Castiello et al. 2010). From the 14th week of gestation, the reaches of Twin A toward Twin B take longer, and decelerate over a longer period, than reaches toward the uterine wall or A's mouth. They take slightly longer, and decelerate over a slightly longer period, than reaches toward A's eye, the most sensitive part of A's body. Although no reciprocal exchanges are recorded, these findings demonstrate a prenatal "propensity to social action" (ibid.). They appear to support the assumption that the meaning "person" is fundamental.
Piaget (1963, pp. 147–149) holds that the infant's awareness of his action originates when he performs a complex act, such as getting food from a closed box, for he has to keep the main goal and direction in mind while performing the intermediate steps. I have offered a different account, but it is of interest that Piaget too did not concede that all goal-directed actions imply self-awareness.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to Rosenthal (1982).
Likewise, the neonatal-imitation experiment has the ingredients required to trigger the You-I event—it even stresses them. We should note, however, that neonatal imitation does not noticeably occur in nature. (If it did, its discovery in 1972 would not have encountered almost universal skepticism.) As distinct from later imitation, the neonatal sort is likely an experimental byproduct of the matching system, which has a different and more important natural function, namely, the instituting of the You-I event.
Citing Trevarthen (1984), Lavelli and Poli (1998) write that "the capability to maintain visual contact starts to emerge between the fourth and the sixth week of life (although in most of cases this capability doesn't seem to appear before the sixth week)…." Between 4 and 6 weeks is the time when the social smile emerges. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to Lavelli and Poli.
See Freud and Dann (1951) on 2-year-olds in and after a Nazi concentration camp.
See Note 3 above.
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Acknowledgments
My gratitude to Nancy Mangum McCaslin for her keen and unflagging eye. Likewise to Daniel Price and the two anonymous reviewers for their many productive criticisms and suggestions.
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Langfur, S. The You-I event: on the genesis of self-awareness. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 769–790 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9282-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9282-y