In this first essay we focus on the baby’s early lived experience, specifically on the origins and early development of the sense of self – of the person as a doer doing with others. By being a doer we mean both acting and taking in, both initiating and responding to others and to oneself.
In the pages that follow, we will delineate developmental events that intersect and build toward the individual’s sense of an agentic self. The upshot of these developmental processes is a sense of self that is embedded in bodily experience, intersubjective relations, and a historically determined cultural environment. Ultimately, we will highlight 12 developmental processes inherent in the emergent sense of self that subsequently play a significant role in our approach to therapy and our understanding of the basis of effecting positive change, two topics we will take up yet more thoroughly in our second essay. But here let us note at the outset that the effectiveness of these early processes in fostering an emergent, enlivened self in early life may be enhanced or diminished by positive or negative occurrences in subsequent development.
Postulations of a balance between agency and relatedness as aspects of self development already have an extensive history in recent analytic theory. In 1989, Lichtenberg proposed,
The Creation and Development of a Sense of an Agentic Self
Being a “doer” and “doing with other and with self” entail experiences of oneself as motivated and as having intentions and goals. We encapsulate those experiences under the rubric of a “sense of an agentic self.” Furthermore, we consider this “self” to involve two domains. One domain is experiential involving the incipient sense of self. It is important to observe at the outset that the experience of the self is not synonymous with conscious awareness. Lived experience encompasses both implicit and explicit modes. A doer doing with others and with self is under the constant influence of implicit as well as explicit modes of experience.
A second domain entailed in the formation of the agentic self involves neural processes that categorize, organize, stabilize, modify, integrate, and recategorize. Each of these two basic domains – the experiential self-system and the neural process self-system subtending it – would present an incomplete portrayal of development without the other. The gradual development and maturation of the system of neural networks make experiencing possible. As experiencing occurs, the maps and schemas of neural networks form and continuously undergo revision, and, as experiences repeat, the strength of the connections of the involved neural networks increases. We will follow the two domains, the thread of implicit and explicit experience and the thread of process that derives from the neural networks, and emphasize one or the other as each amplifies the creation of a sense of self in general, and the agentic sense of self in particular.
We contend that a full-term neonate has a “mind.” The criteria on which we base this premise are that neonates experience affects, have perceptions, create images, form implicit memories, and discriminate among caregivers. Furthermore, neonates have processes that allow for the rapid categorizing and organizing of information. In addition, neonates and young infants seek and respond to familiar experiences while also being open to the activation of interest triggered by novelty. More than a decade ago, in their thought provoking chapter on “Early capacities and presymbolic representation,” Beebe and Lachmann (2002) presented extensive research evidence as to the timing of developments that “provide us with a view of the infant as an astonishingly competent creature” (p. 65). “Competent” here refers to capacities that allow an infant to be a doer doing, initiating and responding, across a wide range of affects, intentions, and goals (motivational systems). The findings detailed in this essay and in contemporary infant research challenge and contradict the theory of primary narcissism and views of the infant as autistic, undifferentiated, grandiose, and omnipotent.
In the following sections we combine observational descriptions with research and theories that track the creation of the sense of self as an affective agent. Rather than offer a chronological presentation of development, in each of the sections we focus on one of the many facets of early development. We will organize this survey around a series of responses to the following questions, questions that taken together depict the integrative tapestry of emergent development in the first year of life.
- What can be recognized about the emergence of a sense of an agentic self in the first minutes of a neonate’s life?
- What prenatal predispositions influence the neonate’s experience of being a doer doing with others and with self?
- As development proceeds, how are images categorized?
- How do early preferences for a helper or giver and aversion to a hinderer or taker emerge? How do these preferences interact with the early origins of narrative capacity?
- How does self-touch and being touched emerge? What does touch contribute to the dyadic system?
- What groupings of experiences of intentions and goals (motivational systems) can be recognized early in infancy?
- How does the experience of being a doer with affects and consciousness emerge?
- How do thresholds for positive and negative affect activation become established?
- How do infants acquire and develop the basic elements of speech?
- What is the significance of the bidirectional mode of infant-caregiver interplay and the inferences and attributions that emerge?
- How does being a socially competent doer emerge in infancy?
- What is the infant’s experience of being a playful doer doing in response to the invitations that come from the nonhuman environment: a ball is to throw, a teddy is to hug?
- How do infants acquire the ability to be a doer who can both initiate interactions with others and cooperate with the initiatives of others?
- Parallel with the trajectories for those infants developing a secure capacity for bidirectional initiating and cooperating, what are pathways that lead to disruptions of initiating and failures in cooperating?
- What are the many processes that lead to the emergence and functioning of motivational systems, and how are motivational systems integrated with the sense of an agentic self?
- What allows the agentic self to advance from the early modes of intentions and goals to the greater complexity of the verbal symbolic system and creativity? Here the focus will be on the essential role of metaphoric processes.
- When the doer doing encounters obstacles, how do we understand the divergent pathways leading toward confidence and optimism or alternatively toward insecurity and pessimism? Here the focus is on what is traditionally called, following Tronick (2002), disruption-repair sequences, though we add to this, following Kohut (1977), the idea that repair involves the restoration of an empathically based relationship.
- How do we understand early memory that interlocks with subsymbolic and imagistic symbolic processing and influences the trajectory for the doer’s varied expectations, intentions, and goals?
- What role do experiences of awe and admiration play in the doer’s evaluation of others and self?
- Summarizing from the prior sections, what lived experiences crucial for development in the first years of life are basic to the processes that subsequently facilitate therapy?
Again, each question and answer may be viewed as if one is looking through a prism at a particular aspect of development bearing on the sense of self. Our choice not to present a chronological account is in keeping with the complexity and plasticity of nonlinear dynamic systems. We hold that the traditional presentation of stages conveys a falsely linear perspective. Rather than occurring in fixed phases, we view development in terms of flexible, somewhat unpredictable trajectories of multiple pathways and outcomes. The enlivened self begins in infancy. But its trajectory is not a linear one.
Mrs. H
While the main thrust of the present discussion is to provide a view of the developments of the agentic sense of self through observations and research on the infant in the first year of life, we preface our examination of infancy by presenting an adult patient whose first year of life was reconstructed in a long and difficult analysis. Just as the concept of the enlivened self originates out of our therapeutic experiences, so, too, does our interest in early life. And this raises the issue of what exactly do we learn in the analysis of an adult that might enrich our curiosity about and appreciation for experiences of being a doer doing in very early development.
The patient in question, Mrs. H, has been chosen because so much of what emerged and was enacted and was revealed by her in the course of treatment dealt with her very early life experiences of success and failure in being an affective doer doing with others. To a striking degree the dispositional influences arising from Mrs. H’s early life experiences could be linked to her adult successes and failures in being a doer doing.
Both development throughout life and progress in psychoanalysis are strongly influenced by framing contexts. The context for the narrative of Mrs. H’s analysis is that the analyst, who is one of us (J. L.), was a candidate treating his first patient in a training institute that emphasized neutrality, abstinence, and anonymity, and oedipal conflict. The case supervisor was a strong advocate of the conservative approach, but fortunately was open to the significance of preoedipal development. The combination of the analyst’s inexperience, uncertainty, and struggles with the constraining strictures placed on his responsiveness combined with the patient’s intense needs in such a way as to create an ambiance of ongoing tension.
Now, fifty years after the termination of this analysis, the relational stresses can be seen to have constituted an implicit enactment that probably exaggerated the manifestations of Mrs. H’s emotional pathology. Nonetheless, however exaggerated or caricatured these manifestation were, due to the framing context, what we found has a ring of authenticity supported by subsequent research and observations. (We are pleased to note that the initial paper, written for presentation in 1964 and based on Mrs. H’s by then completed analysis, was entitled “On the vicissitudes of the early awareness of the self.”)
Mrs. H came for analytic treatment because of a severe cancer phobia that gradually metamorphosed into a fear of becoming pregnant. In the initial consultative interview, she manifested immediately a heightened tension and difficulty in talking freely, a difficulty that became painfully characteristic of many subsequent sessions. Rather than being volunteered in a conversational, spontaneous flow, information was provided in a burst of words in response to a specific question. Her only comment that had a ring of spontaneity and intensity in the first interview occurred toward the end when I asked her if there was any important person in her life she had not spoken of. She replied: “No. I have a twin. She is 10 minutes younger. I never let her forget it. I bossed her all the time. I was always the smart one – she the pretty one.” During the next four-and-a-half years of treatment, she elaborated on this theme: She did better in school; she forced her sister to give her a favorite doll; she was energetic and her sister lazy; she was better at sewing, cooking, managing money, and had married first.
These early years of analytic work were also marked by persistent silences; on one occasion the silence lasted for seven consecutive hours. Mrs. H’s silences were accompanied by a parallel constraint on my part that I felt I was required to maintain. Additionally, she isolated daily events, and events occurring during sessions, and kept herself fixed to these items shorn of any connections to larger contexts. Yet she would simultaneously feel guilty, depressed, and hopeless about her defensiveness. This picture of a tense, inhibited, laconic, depressed, embarrassed, shame-faced woman contrasted completely with her usual personality. Outside the analysis, as she described herself and reported being viewed by others, she was generally garrulous, gossipy, aggressive, energetic, and flirtatious.
She treated each issue of the arrangements – hours, fee, and so on – as a struggle for domination. Whatever the decision, she would briefly rail against it or bear it in pained, victimized silence, but what her feelings might mean was never to be discussed. The prototypic interaction was that nothing could be discussed or negotiated as though between well-intentioned equals. A matter in dispute was settled by the instantaneous, often unconscious judgment that she or the other person was being mean, unjust, impatient, and dogmatic, and nothing further could or needed to be said about it.
A major turning point occurred unexpectedly in the fifth year. By this time we had been able to connect her fear first of cancer and then of pregnancy with her belief that her body, like her mother’s, was fragile. During the mother’s pregnancy with Mrs. H and her twin the mother had been quite ill. The twins were born prematurely and spent three months in an incubator. Subsequently they were cared for by multiple caregivers while the mother recovered. Another issue was Mrs. H’s doubts about her ability to regulate either retention or expulsion, the difficulty being based on early and premature efforts at toilet training. By this time in the treatment, although Mrs. H vigorously denied any benefit from the analysis, she experienced many gains in her outside life. Particularly noteworthy was the following: She had discontinued contraceptive use, become pregnant, and with no difficulty had given birth to a daughter.
A year and some months afterward, when her daughter was 16 months old, Mrs. H began to talk anxiously about her daughter’s play with another child of the same age. As she talked about the aggressive elements in their play, to my surprise I recognized that she identified strongly with the underdog. Her poignant feeling for the child’s losing possession of a toy or being pushed around was in stark contrast to the manner in which she usually talked about rivalry. From this, I inferred that the patient had blocked awareness of all memory of a period when her twin sister, and not she, had been the dominating one. Prior to this, the only reference to Mrs. H not having consistently bested her twin was a brief statement that, while the sister had been a better reader in the first grade, Mrs. H had worked hard and soon moved into the best reading group.
Catching up and overtaking proved to be a prototype for her entire early development. Mrs. H, the older by 10 minutes, but by two pounds the smaller of the premature twins, had been slower in maturation than her larger sister. She had been less able to comply with efforts at feeding and at premature toilet training, spoke later and less well, and was the loser in early scraps with her sister. As soon as she could, by the third and fourth year, she used her energetic nature to struggle and scramble ahead in every area, including talking. Her narratives of how she bested her twin were often accompanied by a burst of uncontrolled laughter at her sister’s discomfort. Interpretations of the meaning of the laughter, especially its fragmentary appearances in the transference, led Mrs. H to a full recognition of her sadistic enjoyment of turning the tables on someone, of frustrating the frustrator. Its opposite, being the disadvantaged one of a pair, was felt by the patient as a painful humiliation.
Only with great difficulty could Mrs. H come to recognize and accept the detrimental influence on her current relationships of her tendency to experience polar alternative positions of, at one extreme, being the humiliated underdog, and, at the other extreme, being the one who overcomes and enjoys it sadistically. The fear of reexperiencing the humiliation of her early struggles with her twin led her to avoid challenges. She feared she might be as unsuccessful as she had been in the first years – that is, she might revert to the “I am the one who can’t talk” role as she did early in the analysis. Her mood was also affected. The mother’s responses exacerbated the differences between the twins. She was more giving to the cheerier, less finicky, larger twin, and less so to my patient, whose contrasting tendencies, so like the mother’s, were a mixture of shared depression and disapproval.
The silences during Mrs. H’s analysis took on varied meanings at different times. From the standpoint of interpretive practice during the period in which the treatment was conducted, silence was regarded primarily as a manifestation of defense. Viewed as we would now, through the lens of motivational systems theory, each experience of silence could have been regarded as an expression of a particular intention and goal. When Mrs. H used silence as a means of withdrawal from shame, self-defeat, and humiliation, it served aversive and self-protective functions. When she was angry and withholding, the silence was motivated by a need to react antagonistically in the face of a belief that she was being abandoned by my silent disapproval. When she felt pessimism and a lack of agency, especially in the absence of an empathic response from me, she reexperienced the hopelessness of “I am the twin who is yet incapable of talking.” But she could also utilize the “I can’t talk” role to assert a perverse power through sadistic defiance. There were yet other variations. Particularly when the analysis began proving helpful, some silences took on a more positive quality. In these silences, Mrs. H experienced a respite, an opportunity to just be, to let her nontasked mind wander, while she replenished her energy in a quiet place with a controlled temperature and an accepting other. These replenishing mind-wandering silences occurred particularly after periods when she had been hectically scurrying about being the energetic, capable one. In these instances the silences were motivated by a need for physiological regulation combined with activating a sense of an attachment connection to a nondemanding, noncritical caregiver. Sile...
