The Interpersonal World of the Infant

A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology

Daniel N. Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429921131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book attempts to create a dialogue between the infant as revealed by the experimental approach and as clinically reconstructed, in the service of resolving the contradiction between theory and reality. It describes the several ways that organization can form in the infant's mind.

Part I
The Questions and Their Background

Chapter 1
Exploring the Infant's Subjective Experience: A Central Role for the Sense of Self

ANYONE CONCERNED with human nature is drawn by curiosity to wonder about the subjective life of young infants. How do infants experience themselves and others? Is there a self to begin with, or an other, or some amalgam of both? How do they bring together separate sounds, movements, touches, sights, and feelings to form a whole person? Or is the whole grasped immediately? How do infants experience the social events of "being with" an other? How is "being with" someone remembered, or forgotten, or represented mentally? What might the experience of relatedness be like as development proceeds? In sum, what kind of interpersonal world or worlds does the infant create?

Posing these questions is something like wondering what the universe might have been like the first few hours after the big bang. The universe was created only once, way out there, while interpersonal worlds are created, in here, every day in each new infant's mind. Yet both events, at almost opposite frontiers, remain remote and inaccessible to our direct experience.

Since we can never crawl inside an infant's mind, it may seem pointless to imagine what an infant might experience. Yet that is at the heart of what we really want and need to know. What we imagine infant experience to be like shapes our notions of who the infant is. These notions make up our working hypotheses about infancy. As such, they serve as the models guiding our clinical concepts about psychopathology: how, why, and when it begins. They are the wellspring of ideas for experiments about infants: what do they think and feel? These working theories also determine how we, as parents, respond to our own infants, and ultimately they shape our views of human nature.

Because we cannot know the subjective world that infants inhabit, we must invent it, so as to have a starting place for hypothesis-making. This book is such an invention. It is a working hypothesis about infants' subjective experience of their own social life.

The proposed working theory arises now, because the enormous research advances of the recent past have put in our hands whole new bodies of information about infants, as well as new experimental methods to inquire about their mental life. The result is a new view of the infant as observed.

One aim of this book is to draw some inferences about the infant's subjective life from this new observational data. This has not been done before, for two reasons. On the one hand, developmentalists, who are creating this new information, generally work within the tradition of observational and experimental research. In keeping with that approach, they choose not to make inferential leaps about the nature of subjective experience. Their emphasis on objective phenomena, even in clinical matters, is in line with the phenomenological trend now prevalent in American psychiatry, but it places severe limits on what can be embraced as clinical reality—objective happenings only, not subjective happenings. And just as importantly, this approach remains unresponsive to the basic questions about the nature of the infant's experience.

Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, in building their developmental theories continually make inferences about the nature of the infant's subjective experiences. This has been both a liability and a great strength. It has permitted their theories to embrace a larger clinical reality that includes life as subjectively experienced (and that is why it works clinically). But they have made their inferential leaps on the basis of reconstructed clinical material alone, and in the light of older and outdated views of the infant as observed. The new observational data has not yet been fully addressed by psychoanalysis, although important attempts in that direction have begun (see, for example, Brazelton 1980; Sander 1980; Call, Galenson, and Tyson 1983; Lebovici 1983; Lichtenberg 1981, 1983).

I have worked for some years as both a psychoanalyst and a developmentalist, and I feel the tension and excitement between these two points of view. The discoveries of developmental psychology are dazzling, but they seem doomed to remain clinically sterile unless one is willing to make inferential leaps about what they might mean for the subjective life of the infant. And the psychoanalytic developmental theories about the nature of infant experience, which are essential for guiding clinical practice, seem to be less and less tenable and less interesting in light of the new information about infants. It is against this background, which I know to be shared by many others, that I will attempt to draw inferences about the infant's subjective social experience from this new data base. The aims of this book, then, are to use these inferences to describe a working hypothesis of the infant's experience and to evaluate their possible clinical and theoretical implications.

Where can we start inventing infants' subjective experience of their own social life? I plan to start by placing the sense of self at the very center of the inquiry.

The self and its boundaries are at the heart of philosophical speculation on human nature, and the sense of self and its counterpart, the sense of other, are universal phenomena that profoundly influence all our social experiences.

While no one can agree on exactly what the self is, as adults we still have a very real sense of self that permeates daily social experience. It arises in many forms. There is the sense of a self that is a single, distinct, integrated body; there is the agent of actions, the experiencer of feelings, the maker of intentions, the architect of plans, the transposer of experience into language, the communicator and sharer of personal knowledge. Most often these senses of sell reside out of awareness, like breathing, but they can be brought to and held in consciousness. We instinctively process our experiences in such a way that they appear to belong to some kind of unique subjective organization that we commonly call the sense of self.

Even though the nature of self may forever elude the behavioral sciences, the sense of self stands as an important subjective reality, a reliable, evident phenomenon that the sciences cannot dismiss. How we experience ourselves in relation to others provides a basic organizing perspective for all interpersonal events.

The reasons for giving the sense of self a central position, even— or especially—in a study of the preverbal infant, are many. First, several senses of the self may exist in preverbal forms, yet these have been relatively neglected. We comfortably assume that at some point later in development, after language and self-reflexive awareness are present, the subjective experience of a sense of self arises and is common to everyone, providing a cardinal perspective for viewing the interpersonal world. And certainly a sense of self is readily observable after self-reflexive awareness and language are present. A crucial question for this book is, does some kind of preverbal sense of self exist before that time? There are three possibilities. Language and self-reflection could act simply by revealing senses of the self that had already existed in the preverbal infant, that is, by making them evident as soon as the child can give an introspective account of inner experiences. Alternatively, language and self-reflection could transform or even create senses of the self that would only come into existence at the very moment they became the subject matter of self-reflection.

It is a basic assumption of this book that some senses of the self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language. These include the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, of continuity in time, of having intentions in mind, and other such experiences we will soon discuss. Self-reflection and language come to work upon these preverbal existential senses of the self and, in so doing, not only reveal their ongoing existence but transform them into new experiences. If we assume that some preverbal senses of the self start to form at birth (if not before), while others require the maturation of later-appearing capacities before they can emerge, then we are freed from the partially semantic task of choosing criteria to decide, a priori, when a sense of self really begins. The task becomes the more familiar one of describing the developmental continuities and changes in something that exists in some form from birth to death.

Some traditional psychoanalytic thinkers dismiss the whole issue of a preverbal subjective life as outside the pale of legitimate inquiry on both the methodological and the theoretical grounds just mentioned. They are joined in this position by many developmental experimentalists. Legitimate inquiry about human experience would, in that view, preclude the study of its very origins.

And that is exactly what we wish to study. Accordingly, it must be asked, what kind of a sense of self might exist in a preverbal infant? By "sense" I mean simple (non-self-reflexive) awareness. We are speaking at the level of direct experience, not concept. By "of self" I mean an invariant pattern of awarenesses that arise only on the occasion of the infant's actions or mental processes. An invariant pattern of awareness is a form of organization. It is the organizing subjective experience of whatever it is that will later be verbally referenced as the "self." This organizing subjective experience is the preverbal, existential counterpart of the objectifiable, self-reflective, verbalizable self.

A second reason for placing the sense of self, as it may exist preverbally, at the center of this inquiry is the clinical one of understanding normal interpersonal development. I am mostly concerned with those senses of the self that are essential to daily social interactions, not to encounters with the inanimate world. I will therefore focus on those senses of the self that if severely impaired would disrupt normal social functioning and likely lead to madness or great social deficit. Such senses of the self include the sense of agency (without which there can be paralysis, the sense of non-ownership of self-action, the experience of loss of control to external agents); the sense of physical cohesion (without which there can be fragmentation of bodily experience, depersonalization, out-of-body experiences, derealization); the sense of continuity (without which there can be temporal disassociation, fugue states, amnesias, not "going on being," in Winnicott's term); the sense of affectivity (without which there can be anhedonia, dissociated states); the sense of a subjective self that can achieve intersubjectivity with another (without which there is cosmic loneliness or, at the other extreme, psychic transparency); the sense of creating organization (without which there can be psychic chaos); the sense of transmitting meaning (without which there can be exclusion from the culture, little socialization, and no validation of personal knowledge). In short, these senses of the self make up the foundation for the subjective experience of social development, normal and abnormal.

A third reason for placing the sense of self at the center of a developmental inquiry is that recently there have been renewed attempts to think clinically in terms of various pathologies of the self (Kohut 1971, 1977). As Cooper (1980) points out, however, it is not that the self has been newly discovered. The essential problem of the self has been crucial to all clinical psychologies since Freud and for a variety of historical reasons has culminated in a psychology of the self. It has also been central to many of the dominant strains in academic psychology (for example, Baldwin 1902; Cooley 1912; Mead 1934).

The final reason to focus upon the sense of self in infancy is that it fits with a strong clinical impression about the developmental process. Development occurs in leaps and bounds; qualitative shifts may be one of its most obvious features. Parents, pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists all agree that new integrations arrive in quantum leaps. Observers also concur that the periods between two and three months (and to a lesser degree between five and six months), between nine and twelve months, and around fifteen to eighteen months are epochs of great change. During these periods of change, there are quantum leaps in whatever level of organization one wishes to examine, from electroencephalographic recordings to overt behavior to subjective experience (Emde, Gaensbauer, and Harmon 1976; McCall, Eichhorn, and Hogarty 1977; Kagan, Kearsley, and Zelazo 1978; Kagan 1984). Between these periods of rapid change are periods of relative quiessence, when the new integrations appear to consolidate.

At each of these major shifts, infants create a forceful impression that major changes have occurred in their subjective experience of self and other. One is suddenly dealing with an altered person. And what is different about the infant is not simply a new batch of behaviors and abilities; the infant suddenly has an additional "presence" and a different social "feel" that is more than the sum of the many newly acquired behaviors and capacities. For instance, there is no question that when, sometime between two and three months, an infant can smile responsively, gaze into the parent's eyes, and coo, a different social feel has been created. But it is not these behaviors alone, or even in combination, that achieve the transformation. It is the altered sense of the infant's subjective experience lying behind these behavioral changes that makes us act differently and think about the infant differently. One could ask, which comes first, an organizational change within the infant or a new attribution on the part of the parent? Does the advent of new infant behaviors such as focal eye contact and smiling make the parent attribute a new persona to the infant whose subjective experience has not as yet changed at all? In fact, any change in the infant may come about partly by virtue of the adult interpreting the infant differently and acting accordingly. (The adult would be working within the infant's proximal zone of development, that is, in an area appropriate to infant capacities not yet present but very soon to emerge.) Most probably, it works both ways. Organizational change from within the infant and its interpretation by the parents are mutually facilitative. The net result is that the infant appears to have a new sense of who he or she is and who you are, as well as a different sense of the kinds of interactions that can now go on.

Another change in sense of self is seen at about age nine months, when suddenly infants seem to sense that they have an interior subjective life of their own and that others do too. They become relatively less interested in external acts and more interested in the mental states that go on "behind" and give rise to the acts. The sharing of subjective experience becomes possible, and the subject matter for interpersonal exchanges is altered. For example, without using any words, the infant can now communicate something like "Mommy, I want you to look over here (alter your focus of attention to match my focus of attention), so that you too will see how exciting and delightful this toy is (so that you can share my subjective experience of excitement and pleasure)." This infant is operating with a different sense of self and of other, participating in the social world with a different organizing subjective perspective about it.

Given the sense of self as the starting point for this inquiry into the infant's subjective experience of social life, we will examine the different senses of self that appear to emerge as the maturation of capacities makes possible new organizing subjective perspectives about self and other. And we will examine the implications of such a developmental process for clinical theory and practice. The following is a summary of the major points of our examination.

Infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation. There is no confusion between self and other in the beginning or at any point during infancy. They are also predesigned to be selectively responsive to external social events and never experience an autistic-like phase.

During the period from two to six months, infants consolidate the sense of a core self as a separate, cohesive, bounded, physical unit, with a sense of their own agency, affectivity, and continuity in time. There is no symbiotic-like phase. In fact, the subjective experiences of union with another can occur only after a sense of a core self and a core other exists. Union experiences are thus viewed as the successful result of actively organizing the experience of self-being-with-another, rather than as the product of a passive failure of the ability to differentiate self from other.

The period of life from roughly nine to eighteen months is not primarily devoted to the developmental tasks of independence or autonomy or individuation—that is, of getting away and free from the primary caregiver. It is equally devoted to the seeking and creating of intersubjective union with another, which becomes possible at this age. This process involves learning that one's subjective life—the contents of one's mind and the qualities of one's feelings— can be shared with another. So while separation may proceed in some domains of self-experience, new forms of being with another are proceeding at the same time in other domains of self-experience. (Different domains of self-experience refer to experiences that occur within the perspective of different senses of the self.)

This last point highlights a more general conclusion. I question the entire notion of phases of development devoted to specific clinical issues such as orality, attachment, autonomy, independence, and trust. Clinical issues that have been viewed as the developmental tasks for specific epochs of infancy are seen here a...