Reference to the notion of self plays a crucial role in a multitude of areas in philosophy and in social and human sciences; arguably most important, the notion of self seems to be an indispensable and central concept of the common-sense view of the world. It is the concept of an entity that, despite being extremely elusive and difficult to explicate, is the most fundamental piece of our mental life, something that makes all the rest of it possible. Despite this centrality, there is no consensus on what the self is, or even on its very existence.
In this book, we offer a theory of the self (which is at the same time a theory of self-consciousness, as will be clarified over the course of the book), whose core ideas are that (1) the self is a process, a psychobiological system activity of self-representing, and (2) this process aims mainly at defending the self-conscious subject against the threat of its metaphysical inconsistence. In other words, the self is essentially a repertoire of psychological maneuvers whose outcome is a self-representation aimed at coping with the fundamental fragility of the human subject. It is a constructive process that starts in the very early stages of our life and runs unceasingly throughout our entire life.
Our picture of the self differs from both the idealist and the eliminative approaches widely represented in contemporary discussion. Against the idealist approach, we deny that the self is something primitive and logically prior: a mental entity describable as the owner of its own mental states. Rather, we take it to be the result of a process of construction that starts with subpersonal unconscious processes. On the other hand, we also reject the anti-realistic, eliminative argument that, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, infers its status as an illusory by-product of real neurobiological events, devoid of any explanatory role. Our approach is then both derivative and realistic.
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Our view of the self will be justified by a combination of philosophical arguments and data from cognitive sciences. The conceptual framework of our investigation can be described as naturalistic, bottom-up, and systemic-relational. Let us clarify each of these perspectives.
By ânaturalisticâ we simply mean a framework that takes science seriously, at least in the sense that it is not possible for such a perspective to be in contrast with established findings provided by scientific disciplines. Even though we are not committed to taking our scientific view of the world as the only way to address the question of the self, we do consider recent findings in the realm of cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology as a constraint upon it.
This brings us to the idea of a âbottom-upâ methodology. From Descartesâ cogito to Husserlâs transcendental ego, philosophy has adopted an inflationary approach to the self. One proceeds top down, starting from the philosopherâs introspective self-consciousness, to arrive at everything else. The subject is taken to be transparent to oneself, and the knowledge provided by the reflective awareness that the mind has of its own structure and contents enjoys a special kind of certainty, which is distinct from our knowledge of the physical world. Our book invites the reader to take the opposite path: we start from the idea of the fruitfulness of a bottom-up, ontogenetic approach, which attempts to reconstruct how the complex psychological functions underlying the adult self-conscious mind evolve from more basic ones. This approach does not appeal to our introspective self-knowledge, but rather to the results of investigations into the gradual construction of human self-awareness: from the automatic and pre-reflective processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through the awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity.
Our conceptual framework, however, aims to avoid not only a top-down ontologically inflationary approach to the self, but also an overly reductionist approach which explains everything in terms of bottom-up neurocognitive mechanisms. This is where a contextualist and systemic perspective comes into play. Here the individualâs psychological problems are investigated by putting them in the inter-individual and social context in which they arise and obtain a sense. This systemic naturalism is rooted in the Chicago school of functionalism, and is the foundation of attachment theoryânamely, the psychodynamic tradition within which we will develop our theory of self-consciousness.
The result of this multidimensional approach is a theory of self-consciousness according to which two aspects of the self are to be distinguished: on the one hand, there is a selfing process (the âIâ, in Jamesian terminology), which is a synthesis function that works mainly at the subpersonal level; on the other hand there is the product of this process: the representation of the self (in Jamesâ words: the âMeâ), which is partly open to conscious inspection. The Me, which is constantly updated by the selfing process, is in the first place bodily, then psychological. The highest developmental point of this process is the narrative self, which is one among the layers of personality. This view involves a criticism of the primacy of self-conscious subjectivity, which, far from being a primary givenness, is unveiled as an articulate construction consisting of several neurocognitive and psychosocial components. As existentialist phenomenology puts it, we do not possess an essence that precedes our existence; our âbeing-thereâ is always the being-there of a living body operating in a physical and social context, with a history. And it will be argued that this being-there is characterized primarily by its precariousness. In the absence of any metaphysical guarantee, the constructed self (the Me) is perpetually beset by the risk of its own disintegration. Hence the already-mentioned defensive nature of the self, its being primarily a process whose teleology is focused on self-protection or self-defence.
As the reader can already realize from these introductory remarks, there are several strands in this book. In particular, it combines cognitive psychology, analytical philosophy and psychodynamics (not to mention some excursions into a âcontinentalâ philosophical anthropology). In a vague but (we hope) understandable sense, the result is more an exercise in the philosophy of psychology than in the metaphysics of mindâeven if our naturalistic methodology renders the boundaries between epistemological and metaphysical worries somewhat vague and undefined. Nor do we propose a systematic comparison with the classical phenomenological approach. We simply follow our route from subpersonal unconscious processes to the personal conscious self-representation and in doing so we address metaphysical or phenomenological problems as they present themselves.
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Let us now give an overview of the structure of the book.
The second chapter is devoted to an analysis of the notion of unconscious, both in the cognitivist sense (the so-called âcognitive unconsciousâ) and in the Freudian sense. We explain why cognitive sciences focus on unconscious processes and structures, strongly diminishing the importance of the conscious level, and we determine what is alive and what is dead in Freudâs theory of the unconscious. Starting from this analysis, we argue that the strategy, pursued in cognitive science, of explaining behavior and mental phenomena with unconscious or subpersonal processes and structures is fruitful. However, since this approach runs the risk of overextending the scope of the concept of mind (this is the âmark of the mentalâ problem), and of making the problem of unifying personal-level explanations with scientific explanations of mental phenomena (the âinterface problemâ) more difficult, we also make a case for a dialectical relationship between personal and subpersonal levels of analysis. In particular, we submit that certain psychodynamic constructs very close to the personal level (paradigmatically, the notion of attachment) are indispensable to an account of self-consciousness. The chapter thus ends with the development of the psychodynamic framework within which to conduct our research on self-consciousness. We focus on relational themes, especially on the forms of cognitive-affectional relationality of the very young child. As is shown by the theories of object relations and attachment, physical contact and the construction of protective and communicative interpersonal structures constitute the infantâs primordial psychological needs, around which her mental life gradually takes form.
In the third chapter, we undertake our realist (neither idealist nor eliminative) view of the self, arguing that the first and fundamental form of self-consciousness is the consciousness of oneâs own body, taken as a whole. We start with a criticism of the âexclusion thesisâ, the claim that there is no room for something like the self in the natural orderâa thesis that in modern philosophy goes back to Humeâs and Kantâs criticisms of the Cartesian self. After having dismissed the Humean eliminative approaches to the self, we turn to a critical examination of two different approaches to the theme of self-consciousness. The first perspective is that of analytic Kantianism, a line of thought that stems from Peter Strawsonâs The Bounds of Sense; the second perspective is the project to provide a naturalistic version of the phenomenological claim that conscious experience entails self-consciousness, which has been pursued especially by Dan Zahavi.
The trouble with the former, whatever its intrinsic merits, is that it is unable to provide a genuinely empirical account of self-consciousness: the Kantian tradition is a form of a priori philosophical psychology, or, better, transcendental epistemology, which, insofar as it is empirically unconstrained, is incompatible with our naturalistic approach. Instead of a transcendental synthesis, we posit a psychobiological synthetic function: the already mentioned selfing process. Moreover, and as a consequence of its purely conceptual character, Kantâs theory of self-consciousness hinges on a view of the human subject as originally unitary; we argue, in contrast, that the subject is primarily non-unitary and gains a sense of unity in the act of raising a bulwark against the threat of not being there.
Against the phenomenological project, we show that there is no pre-reflective or non-reflective self-consciousness that accompanies every conscious state from birth. This is an empirically void construction, ultimately still reminiscent of Kantian transcendentalism. The outcome of this discussion is that the most minimal form of self-consciousness is bodily self-consciousness, the capacity to construct an analogical and imagistic representation of oneâs own body as an entire object, simultaneously taking this representation as a subject, that is, as an active source of the representation of itself. In the last section of this chapter we begin to outline, building on James, our âprocessualâ view of the self: we distinguish between the self as the interminable objectivation process (the I) and the self as the multidimensional representation continuously updated by this process (the Me).
Chapter 4 is devoted to the development of the psychological self: an account is given of how the awareness of ourselves as subjects who are bearers of mental states is constructed from the awareness of oneâs own body. We show that our inner world evolves through an interplayâmodulated by sociocultural variablesâof mentalizing abilities, autobiographical memory and socio-communicative skills. The starting point is a critical discussion of introspection: following Freudâs idea that our inner life is saturated with self-deception and bad faith, we show, based on the enormous amount of confabulation data from cognitive neuropsychology and social psychology, that our knowledge of our mental states is to a large extent inaccurate. Far from realizing that our actions are actually determined by unconscious mechanisms, we âfabricateâ rational post-hoc explanations of our behavior by means of an incomplete, partial and, in many cases, seriously defective folk theory of psychology. Thus, where Descartes saw a given essence (the self-transparent consciousness-substance), there is now something constructed, the product of an apparatus that allows us to partially describe, and above all narratively justify, fundamentally unconscious mental processes. With this result in hand, we focus on the ontogenesis of the inner, virtual âtheaterâ of the mind, arguing that the construction of an introspective experiential space occurs through the process of turning oneâs mentalistic skillsâthe ability to ascribe mental states to othersâupon oneself under the communicative pressure of micro-social contexts. We will look firstly at affective mentalization, arguing that a positive attunement in proto-conversational infant-caregiver interactions plays a crucial causal role in the construction of the phenomenology of basic emotions. We will then examine how the construction of an inner experiential space advances under the thrust of caregiversâ mind-minded talk. Finally, we turn to the most mature and cognitively demanding stage in psychological awareness, that is, the development of a narrative or autobiographical self. Here we highlight the importance of the sociocultural context: data from cultural psychology show that psychological self-consciousness is not an all-or-none phenomenon; the incompleteness of the capacity to conceptualize the existence of an inner experiential space has been observed in normal adults in pre-agricultural or pre-literate agricultural cultures.
In the fifth chapter, we put forward our central thesis about the nature of the self: the idea that the self is essentially a collection of defensive strategies aimed at coping with its lack of a metaphysical guarantee. Indeed, psychological self-consciousness, far from being a stable faculty, is a precarious acquisition, continuously under construction by the subject and constantly exposed to the risk of crisis. This precariousness is, therefore, the key to grasping the defensive nature of narrative identity. Defensiveness is immanent to human self-consciousness, since the latter constitutes itself precisely in the act of taking measures against its own dissolution. The chapter concludes with a clarification of the difference between our position and eliminative accounts (such as Dennettâs) about the self. We show how our naturalistic approach to the narrative self also enables us to reject the antirealist argument that infers, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, a view of it as an epiphenomenal by-product of neurobiological events or, alternatively, of social (or socio-linguistic) practices. The antirealistsâwe will argueâdisregard the essential psychodynamic component of identity self-construction. The need to construct and protect the most valid identity possible is rooted in the subjectâs primary need to subsist subjectively, and thus to exist solidly as a describable ego, as a unitary subject. Far from being the staging of an ephemeral self-deception, the incessant construction and reconstruction of an acceptable and adaptively functioning identity is the process that puts into place our intra and interpersonal balances, and is thus the ground of psychological well-being and mental health. Unlike Dennettâs Joycean monologue, in our model self-narrative is not mere empty chatter: it is a causal center of gravity. In this sense, the psychodynamic component of our theory plays a crucial role in shaping our ârobustâ (i.e., genuinely realist) view of the self.