First Moments of Self-awareness in Childhood

A Phenomenological Approach

Dolph Kohnstamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000403626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

This thought-provoking volume explores the phenomenon of childhood experiences of sudden moments of self-awareness. Locating them as meaningful developmental events, it draws on, and is illustrated by, detailed analysis of individuals' narratives of inner experience and recollections of childhood.

Uniquely highlighting the relevant writings of literary figures such as C.G. Jung, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan, and Henning Mankell, Dolph Kohnstamm explores the construction of selfhood, and the effects it has on time, space, and the other. Together with a chapter assessing the role of the default brain network in the development of self-conception, it both supports and challenges theories of development.

First Moments of Self-awareness in Childhood offers a new conception of children's development of a sense of individuality and will be of great interest to scholars and students of psychology, philosophy, and sociology.

1
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-AWARENESS

For centuries, scholars have been racking their brains over the question how phenomena like self-awareness and self-conception are possible. The capacity to think about yourself – self-reflection – is an aspect of what is currently called ‘meta-cognition’: knowledge about knowledge, ‘super-knowledge’, as it were.

Awareness can rise above the ability to think by formulating thoughts about this ability and expressing these if necessary.

An uncle of mine toured America from East to West and back for a year when he was a 24-year-old student. His last letter before he returned to the Netherlands started as follows:

Now that I am walking on the familiar streets of Washington again, I often look at myself and wonder: how have you changed [because of the trip DK]?¹

Most people are able to think about themselves. We say things like: ‘I was wrong’, or ‘That was stupid of me’, or, worse: ‘I was not myself, Your Honor, I did not know what I was doing’. These are all expressions by someone who says something about his own person.

Apparently, people feel like they consist of two ‘selves’. A ‘self’ who has done something or wants something, who believes something, and another ‘self’ who remarks on this, who wants to oppose this, who is proud of this. However, I believe it is better not to refer to the existence of two ‘selves’, but about two parts of one Self.

A century ago, the American psychologist William James – who is considered the founder of modern psychology – determined that these two parts should best be referred to as ‘I’ and ‘Me’. The I is the subject, the observing part of the Self, and the Me is the object, the objectively observed part. James believed that only the objective Self could be known and studied, and that the subjective Self could not.²

Whatever the case may be, the fact is that we consider talking about two different forms of ‘I’ very natural: the acting ‘I’ (feeling, pursuing, being ill, etc.) and the ‘I’ that reflects on this, and which has an opinion about this acting, feeling, and thinking: ‘I often look at myself and wonder: how have you changed?’

The ‘Me’ as conceptualized by James can think, but not about itself. If it would do so, it would turn into the ‘I’. This means that the ‘Me’ is not self-reflexive. Only the ‘I’ can think about a whole range of things, including about the ‘Me’. The question is whether it can also think about itself as the subject. After all, once the ‘I’ does so, it makes itself the object of its own thoughts.

But how is it possible that I can think something like this? How can people become aware of this duality within themselves? The fields of philosophy and psychology spent a lot of time in search of an answer to this question.

Nowadays, it is up to neuroscientists to find an explanation for this miracle of human awareness. Many have come close, thanks to their knowledge of our brains and their intuition. I consider the most important among them to be the Portuguese-American biologist and neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio, professor in neuroscience at the University of Southern California.

With his background in psychology, he searches for the foundation of this process in the evolutionary development of feelings and emotions, which has lasted for millions for years and during which humanity was the only species in which ‘the Self became the witness of the mind’. This development resulted in the creation of neurological mechanisms that made this possible. And if these were found not to contribute to the survival of the homo species, they disappeared:

“For millions of years, numerous creatures had active minds, but only in those that developed a Self which was found to be able to act as a witness of the mind was the existence of this active mind acknowledged. And only once the mind had developed the language to express this, was it generally admitted that the mind exists. The Self as a witness is a supplementary feature present in each of us, and exposes events we call ‘mental’.”³

The evolutionary development started with what Damasio calls a ‘protoself’, followed by a ‘core self’ from which the Self ultimately develops into an ‘autobiographical self’, of which this book attests in every possible way. The earliest two phases did not yet involve any thoughts about the own mind, as became the case in later self-reflection. In the preliminary stages of the protoself and the core self, humankind did not yet have a language with words and phrases. People could only express their feelings and emotions using guttural sounds, gestures, posture, and facial expressions. However, there will likely have been proper observers in these two stages who were able to derive feelings and emotions like anger, happiness, and sadness from this ‘physical language’.

But in Western philosophy and philosophical ideas about the self and self-awareness, people paid little attention to the development of this self-awareness during childhood and school years for centuries. This was likely in part due to the belief that our body housed an immortal soul that was considered the core and essence of ourselves. If this soul is timeless and immortal, it does not need to develop from nothing into something, as it would already be present upon our birth and reside in our body until our death.

Even Rousseau, who can be considered one of the first developmental psychologists with his Emile novel, did not use his book to discuss the question how children can develop thoughts about themselves, in other words, how they develop a self-image or self-concept.

The self of a newborn baby does not yet consist of more than the merely physical sensations of his or her own body: pleasant sensations – such as a caress, comfortable warmth, and drinking delicious milk – and unpleasant sensations – such as hunger, cold, pain, and tiredness. It would actually be better not to use the term ‘self’ yet because there is no sense yet of unity experienced in a conscious manner. But these first pleasant and unpleasant sensations do in part contribute to the first steps toward what will grow into self-awareness. The Dutch psychiatrist and author Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) wrote:

“Nobody of us can say when he started feeling like ‘I’. I do not remember anything about my feelings as a newborn, as an embryo, but it must have been a sense of being. It would only have been a very small, primitive spark, which slowly grew into a realm of light.”⁴

But how to proceed? How does this spark grow?

After a few months, the physical awareness – the ‘physical self’ – will already consist of more: seeing, hearing, and recognizing events in which the baby plays an active role. Moving hands are a striking example of this. These hands initially do not have any meaning for the baby in relation to the self. They are of the same category as the mobile above the crib. Babies can be enticed looking at their moving hands as they move in and out of their field of vision. Their tiny brains are not yet able to establish a connection between moving and seeing.

But at some point in the early development of their brains, there is a moment when they get the impression that they can move or hold their hands still themselves while looking at them. And that the mobile does not move spontaneously, but only if they hit it with their hand. While observing the world, in a baby grows an early sense of itself, which already consists of more than just pleasant and unpleasant sensations, and which gradually grows into a (physical) self and a non-self.

Spatial observations also play a role in this ‘sense of self’. This concerns how children experience their body amidst other people and objects – close by or far away, touching or not touching, and how this sensation changes when they roll over, crawl, or turn their heads. This also creates a ‘sense of self’, an internal model, a form of core knowledge.

Later, ‘possessions’ start to play a role: ‘mine!’ This is a start of ‘me-knowledge’, potentially accompanied by feelings of pride when achieving things and moving from the safe bond with the parents toward increasing independence.

This is how self-awareness and the ability for self-reflection develop gradually. An autobiographical memory arises: the ability to reflect on and think ahead about events in which I was or will be involved.

But mental leaps do occur, leading to sudden self-awareness.

A German teacher wrote about a memory back from when she was 4 or 5 years old:

“I was sitting in the garden on a summer day. The older children had gone to school. I had put some lettuce in a shoe box and placed a number of snails on it. When I looked at them and wondered what they would do, I realized that I would in all my life never know what it would be like to be a snail. At the same time, I became overwhelmingly aware of myself [‘spürte ich mich selbst’], of my body, of the fact that I was alive, of what I was feeling, of the sun on my back, of the fabric of my dress on my skin, of the wind in my hair, of the sand on my hands. And I was suddenly filled with the greatest sensation of happiness: I am, I feel myself, I do what I want to do, I am internal and external. This event faded over the course of time, but it never disappeared entirely.”

This book discusses such mental leaps.

Notes

1 Dolph Kohnstamm, editor (2001) Still No War: A Correspondence between Two Dutchmen: Son Max and Father Philip Kohnstamm 1938–1939. London, Athena Press.

2 William James (1890) The Principles of Psychology Volume One. New York, Holt & Co. Authorized edition (2014) New York, Dover Publications Inc.

3 Antonio Damasio (2010) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York, Pantheon Books.

4 Frederik van Eeden (1915/2011) Bij het licht van de oorlogsvlam. Amsterdam, Versluys.

2
SUDDEN INSIGHT

One of the most miraculous things a child can experience is the sudden realization of being an independent individual. This can stand out as a new and impressive insight in its conscious mind. It can impress children who experience such insight so much that both the thought and the sensation of that moment, as well as the situation in which it occurred, are engraved into their memories and stay there for years, sometimes even well into their old age.

It is a sudden flash of self-awareness. The later memory of such sudden insight is something different from an earliest memory. Everyone has a first or oldest memory, often of an event from their daily lives which in itself is not very important. These earliest memories often stem from our third year, but there are also people who have memories from their second year, as well as people who cannot remember anything from before their fifth year. An earliest memory is usually quite trivial, even though it is valuable to the person cherishing it.

The sudden fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• I am I
• Foreword
• 1 The development of self-awareness
• 2 Sudden insight
• 3 Sudden self-awareness among authors
• 4 Awareness of being
• 5 I am I, and not someone else
• 6 I can sometimes put myself in someone else’s shoes
• 7 Like I was looking at myself from the outside
• 8 This is my body, I am alive!
• 9 The firmament and the sunlight
• 10 Past times, from now to the end
• 11 Mirrors
• 12 Extraordinary experiences of joy
• 13 Other sudden insights
• 14 Sudden cognitive insights
• 15 A mind-wandering network
• 16 Coda
• Index