DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING OF SELF, THE "I"-FEELING.
Before the child is in a condition to recognize as belonging to him the
parts of his body that he can feel and see, he must have had a great
number of experiences, which are for the most part associated with
_painful feelings_. How little is gained for the development of the
notion of the "I" by means of the first movements of the hands, which
the infant early carries to the mouth, and which must give him, when he
sucks them, a different feeling from that given by sucking the finger of
another person, or other suitable objects, appears from the fact that,
e. g., my child for months tugged at his fingers as if he wanted to pull
them off, and struck his own head with his hand by way of experiment. At
the close of the first year he had a fancy for striking hard substances
against his teeth, and made a regular play of gnashing the teeth. When
on the four hundred and ninth day he stood up straight in bed, holding
on to the railing of it with his hands, _he bit himself on his bare
arm_, and that the upper arm, so that he immediately cried out with
pain. The marks of the incisors were to be seen long afterward. The
child did not a second time bite himself in the arm, but only bit his
fingers, and inadvertently his tongue.
The same child, who likes to hold a biscuit to the mouth of any member
of the family to whom he is favorably disposed, offered the biscuit in
the same way, entirely of his own accord, to his own foot--sitting on
the floor, holding the biscuit in a waiting attitude to his toes--and
this strange freak was repeated many times in the twenty-third month.
The child amused himself with it.
Thus, at a time when the attention to what is around is already very far
developed, one's own person may not be distinguished from the
environment. Vierordt thinks that a discrimination between the general
feelings [i. e., those caused by bodily states] and the sensations that
pertain to the external world exists in the third month. From my
observations I can not agree with him; for, although the division may
begin thus early, yet it does not become complete until much later. In
the ninth month the feet are still eagerly felt of by the little hands,
though not so eagerly as before, and the toes are carried to the mouth
like a new plaything. Nay, even in the nineteenth month it is not yet
clear how much belongs to one's own body. The child had lost a shoe. I
said, "Give the shoe." He stooped, seized it, and gave it to me. Then,
when I said to the child, as he was standing upright on the floor, "Give
the foot," in the expectation that he would hold it out, stretch it
toward me, he grasped at it with both hands, and labored hard to get it
and hand it to me.
How little he understands, even after the first year of his life has
passed, the difference between the parts of his own body and foreign
objects is shown also in some strange experiments that the child
conducted quite independently. He sits by me at the table and
strikes very often and rapidly with his hands successive blows upon
the table, at first gently, then hard; then, with the right hand
alone, hard; next, suddenly strikes himself with the same hand on
the mouth; then he holds his hand to his mouth for a while, strikes
the table again with the right hand, and then on a sudden strikes
his own head (above the ear). The whole performance gave exactly the
impression of his having for the first time noticed that it is one
thing to strike oneself, one's own hard head, and another thing to
strike a foreign hard object (forty-first week). Even in the
thirteenth month the child often raps his head with his hand to try
the effect, and seems surprised at the hardness of the head. In the
sixteenth month he used not unfrequently to set the left thumb
against the left side of the head, and at the same time the right
thumb against the right side of the head, above the ears, with the
fingers spread, and to push at the same time, putting on a strange,
wondering expression of face, with wide-open eyes. This movement is
not imitated and not inherited, but invented. The child is doubtless
making experiments by means of it upon the holding of the head,
head-shaking, resistance of his own body, perhaps also upon the
management of the head, as at every thump of the thumbs against the
temporal bones a dull sound was heard. The objectivity of the
fingers was found out not much before this time by involuntary,
painful biting of them, for as late as the fifteenth month the child
bit his finger so that he cried out with pain. Pain is the most
efficient teacher in the learning of the difference between
subjective and objective.
Another important factor is the _perception of a change produced by
ones own activity_ in all sorts of familiar objects that can be
taken hold of in the neighborhood; and the most remarkable day, from
a psychogenetic point of view, in any case an extremely significant
day in the life of the infant, is the one in which he first
experiences the _connection of a movement executed by himself with a
sense-impression following upon it_. The noise that comes from the
tearing and crumpling of paper is as yet unknown to the child. He
discovers (in the fifth month) the fact that he himself in tearing
paper into smaller and smaller pieces has again and again the new
sound-sensation, and he repeats the experiment day by day and with a
strain of exertion until this connection has lost the charm of
novelty. At present there is not, indeed, as yet any clear insight
into the nexus of cause; but the child has now had the experience
that he can himself be the cause of a combined perception of sight
and sound regularly, to the extent that when he tears paper there
appears, on the one hand, the lessening in size; on the other hand,
the noise. The patience with which this occupation--from the
forty-fifth to the fifty-fifth week especially--is continued with
pleasure is explained by the gratification at being a cause, at the
perception that so striking a transformation as that of the
newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own
activity. Other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again
and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the
shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or
purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the
filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the
strewing about of garden-mold or gravel; the turning of the leaves
of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month); digging and scraping in
the sand; the carrying of footstools hither and thither; the placing
of shells, stones, or buttons in rows (twenty-first month); pouring
water into and out of bottles, cups, watering-pots (thirty-first to
thirty-third months); and, in the case of my boy, the throwing of
stones into the water. A little girl in the eleventh month found her
chief pleasure in "rummaging" with trifles in drawers and little
boxes. Her sister "played" with all sorts of things, taking an
interest in dolls and pictures in the tenth month (Frau von
Struempell). Here, too, the eagerness and seriousness with which
such apparently aimless movements are performed is remarkable.
The satisfaction they afford must be very great, and it probably
has its basis in the feeling of his own power generated by the
movements originated by the child himself (changes of place, of
position, of form) and in the proud feeling of being a cause.
This is not mere playing, although it is so called; it is
_experimenting_. The child that at first merely played like a cat,
being amused with color, form, and movement, has become a _causative
being_. Herewith the development of the _"I"-feeling_ enters upon a
new phase; but it is not yet perfected. Vanity and ambition come in
for the further development of it. Above all, it is _attention_ to
the _parts of his own body_ and the _articles of his dress_, the
nearest of all objects to the child's eye, that helps along the
separation in thought of the child's body from all other objects.
I therefore made special observation of the directing of his look toward
his own body and toward the mirror. In regard to the first I took note,
among other facts, of the following:
_17th week._--In the seizing movements, as yet imperfect, the gaze is
fixed partly on the object, partly on _his own hand_, especially if the
hand has once seized successfully.
_18th week._--The very attentive regarding of the fingers in seizing is
surprising, and is to be observed daily.
_23d week._--When the infant, who often throws his hands about at random
in the air, accidentally gets hold of one hand with the other, he
regards attentively both his hands, which are often by chance folded.
_24th week._--In the same way the child fixes his gaze for several
minutes alternately upon a glove held by himself in his hands and upon
his own fingers that hold it.
_32d week._--The child, lying on his back, _looks_ very frequently _at_
his _legs_ stretched up vertically, especially at his _feet_, as if they
were something foreign to him.
_35th week._--In every situation in which he can do so, the child tries
to grasp a foot with both hands and carry it to his mouth, often with
success. This monkey-like movement seems to afford him special pleasure.
_36th week._--His own hands and feet are no more so frequently observed
by him without special occasion. Other new objects attract his gaze and
are seized.
_39th week._--The same as before. In the bath, however, the child
sometimes looks at and feels of _his own skin_ in various places,
evidently taking pleasure in doing so. Sometimes he directs his gaze
to his legs, which are bent and extended in a very lively manner in the
most manifold variety of positions.
_55th week._--The child looks for a long time attentively at a person
eating, and follows with his gaze every movement; grasps at the
person's face, and then, after _striking himself on the head_, fixes his
gaze on his own hands. He is fond of playing with the fingers of the
persons in the family, and delights in the bendings and extensions,
evidently comparing them with those of his own fingers.
_62d week._--Playing with his own fingers (at which he looks with a
protracted gaze) as if he would pull them off. Again, one hand is
pressed down by the other flat upon the table until it hurts, as if
the hand were a wholly foreign plaything, and it is still looked at
wonderingly sometimes.
From this time forth the gazing at the parts of his own body was
perceptibly lessened. The child _knew_ them as to their form, and
gradually learned to distinguish them from foreign objects as parts
belonging to him; but in this he by no means arrives at the point of
considering, "The hand is mine, the thing seized is not," or "The leg
belongs to me," and the like; but because all the visible parts of the
child's body, on account of very frequently repeated observation, no
longer excite the optic center so strongly and therefore appear no
longer interesting--because the experiences of touch combined with
visual perceptions always recur in the same manner--the child has
gradually become accustomed to them and _overlooks_ them when making
use of his hands and feet. He no longer represents them to himself
separately, as he did before, whereas every new object felt, seen, or
heard, is very interesting to him and is separately represented in idea.
Thus arises the definite separation of object and subject in the child's
intellect. In the beginning the child is new to himself, namely, to the
representational apparatus that gets its development only after birth;
later, after he has become acquainted with himself, after he, namely,
his body, has lost the charm of novelty for him, i. e., for the
representational apparatus in his brain, a dim feeling of the "I"
exists, and by means of further abstraction the concept of the "I" is
formed.
The progress of the intellect in the act of _looking into the mirror_
confirms this conclusion drawn from the above observations.
For the behavior of the child toward his image in the glass shows
unmistakably the gradual growth of the consciousness of self out of
a condition in which objective and subjective changes are not yet
distinguished from each other.
Among the subjective changes is, without doubt, the smiling at the
image in the tenth week, which was probably occasioned merely by the
brightness (Sigismund). Another boy in the twenty-seventh week looked
at himself in the glass with a smile (Sigismund).
Darwin recorded of one of his sons, that in the fifth month he
repeatedly smiled at his father's image and his own in a mirror and
took them for real objects; but he was surprised that his father's
voice sounded from behind him (the child). "Like all infants, he
much enjoyed thus looking at himself, and in less than two months
perfectly understood that it was an image, for if I made quite
silently any odd grimace, he would suddenly turn round to look at
me. He was, however, puzzled at the age of seven months, when, being
out of doors, he saw me on the inside of a large plate-glass window,
and seemed in doubt whether or not it was an image. Another of my
infants, a little girl, was not nearly so acute, and seemed quite
perplexed at the image of a person in a mirror approaching her from
behind. The higher apes which I tried with a small looking-glass
behaved differently. They placed their hands behind the glass, and
in doing so showed their sense; but, far from taking pleasure in
looking at themselves, they got angry and would look no more." The
first-mentioned child, at the age of not quite nine months,
associated his own name with his image in the looking-glass, and
when called by name would turn toward the glass even when at some
distance from it. He gave to "Ah!" which he used at first when
recognizing any person or his own image in a mirror, an exclamatory
sound such as adults employ when surprised. Thus Darwin reports.
My boy gave me occasion for the following observations:
In the eleventh week he does not see himself in the glass. If I knock on
the glass, he turns his head in the direction of the sound. His image
does not, however, make the slightest impression upon him.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth weeks he looks at his image with utter
indifference. His gaze is directed to the eyes in the image without any
expression of pleasure or displeasure.
In the sixteenth week the reflected image is still either ignored or
looked at without interest.
Near the beginning of the seventeenth week (on the one hundred and
thirteenth day) the child for the first time regards his image in the
glass with unmistakable attention, and indeed with the same expression
with which he is accustomed to fix his gaze on a strange face seen for
the first time. The impression appears to awaken neither displeasure nor
pleasure; the perception seems now for the first time to be distinct.
Three days later the child for the first time undoubtedly laughed at his
image.
When, in the twenty-fourth week, I held the child again before the
glass, he saw my image, became very attentive, and suddenly turned round
toward me, manifestly convincing himself that I stood near him.
In the twenty-fifth week he for the first time stretched out his hand
toward his own image. He therefore regarded it as capable of being
seized.
In the twenty-sixth week the child is delighted at seeing me in the
glass. He turns round toward me, and evidently _compares_ the original
with the image.
In the thirty-fifth week the child gayly and with interest grasps at his
image in the glass, and is surprised when his hand comes against the
smooth surface.
In the forty-first to the forty-fourth week, the same. The reflected
image is regularly greeted with a laugh, and is then grasped at.
All these observations were made before a very large stationary mirror.
In the fifty-seventh week, however, I held a small hand-mirror close to
the face of the child. He looked at his image and then passed his hand
behind the glass and moved the hand hither and thither as if searching.
Then he took the mirror himself and looked at it and felt of it on both
sides. When after several minutes I held the mirror before him again,
precisely the same performance was repeated. It accords with what was
observed by Darwin in the case of anthropoid apes mentioned above (p.
197).
In the fifty-eighth week I showed to the child his photograph,
cabinet-size, in a frame under glass. He first turned the picture round
as he had turned the hand-mirror. Although the photographic image was
much smaller than the reflected one, it seemed to be equally esteemed.
On the same day (four hundred and second) I held the hand-mirror before
the boy again, pointing out to him his image in it; but he at once
turned away obstinately (again like the intelligent animal).
Here the incomprehensible--in the literal sense--was disturbing. But
very soon came the insight which is wanting to the quadrumana, for in
the sixtieth week the child saw his mother in the mirror, and to the
question, "Where is mamma?" he pointed to the image in the mirror and
then turned round, laughing, to his mother. Now, as he had before this
time behaved roguishly, there is no doubt that at this time, after
fourteen months, original and image were distinguished with certainty
as such, especially as his own photograph no longer excited wonder.
Nevertheless, the child, in the sixty-first week, is still trying to
feel of his own image in the glass, and he licks the glass in which he
sees it, and, in the sixty-sixth week, also strikes against it with his
hand.
In the following week for the first time I saw the child make grimaces
before the glass. He laughed as he did it. I stood behind him and called
him by name. He turned around directly, although he saw me plainly in
the glass. He evidently knew that the voice did not come from the image.
In the sixty-ninth week signs of vanity are perceived. The child looks
at himself in the glass with pleasure and often. If we put anything on
his head and say, "Pretty," his expression changes. He is gratified in a
strange and peculiar fashion; his eyebrows are raised, and the eyes are
opened wide.
In the twenty-first month the child puts some lace or embroidered stuff
about him, lets it hang down from his shoulders, looks round behind at
the train, advancing, stopping, eagerly throwing it into fresh folds.
Here there is a mixture of apish imitation with vanity.
As the child had, moreover, even in the seventeenth month, been fond of
placing himself before the glass and making all sorts of faces, the
experiments with the mirror were no longer continued.
They show the transition from the infant's condition previous to the
development of the _ego_, when he can not yet see distinctly, to the
condition of the developed _ego_, who consciously distinguishes himself
from his image in the glass and from other persons and their images. Yet
for a long time after this step there exists a certain lack of clearness
in regard to names. In the twenty-first month the child laughs at his
image in the glass and points to it when I ask, "Where is Axel?" and at
my image when asked, "Where is papa?" But, being asked with emphasis,
the child turns round to me with a look of doubt. I once brought a large
mirror near the child's bed in the evening after he had gone to sleep,
so that he might perceive himself directly upon waking. He saw his image
immediately after waking, seemed very much surprised at it, gazed
fixedly at it, and when at last I asked, "Where is Axel?" he pointed not
to himself but to the image (six hundred and twentieth day). In the
thirty-first month it still afforded him great pleasure to gaze at his
image in the glass. The child would laugh at it persistently and
heartily.
Animals show great variety of behavior in this respect, as is well
known. A pair of Turkish ducks, that I used to see every day for weeks,
always kept themselves apart from other ducks. When the female died, the
drake, to my surprise, betook himself by preference to a cellar-window
that was covered on the inside and gave strong reflections, and he would
stand with his head before this for hours every day. He saw his image
there, and thought perhaps that it was his lost companion.
A kitten before which I held a small mirror must surely have taken the
image for a second living cat, for she went behind the glass and around
it when it was conveniently placed.
Many animals, on the contrary, are afraid of their reflected image, and
run away from it.
In like manner little children are sometimes frightened by the discovery
of their own shadows. My child exhibited signs of fear at his shadow the
first time he saw it; but in his fourth year he was pleased with it, and
to the question, "Where does the shadow come from?" he answered, to our
surprise, "From the sun" (fortieth month).
More important for the development of the child's _ego_ than are the
observation of the shadow and of the image in the glass is the learning
of speech, for it is not until words are used that the higher concepts
are first marked off from one another, and this is the case with the
concept of the _ego_. Yet the wide-spread view, that the "I"-_feeling_
first appears with the beginning of the use of the word "I," is wholly
incorrect. Many headstrong children have a strongly marked "I"-feeling
without calling themselves by anything but their names, because their
relatives in speaking with them do not call themselves "I," but "papa,
mamma, uncle, O mamma," etc., so that the opportunity early to hear and
to appropriate the words "I" and "mine" is rare. Others hear these words
often, to be sure, especially from children somewhat older, and use
them, yet do not understand them, but add to them their own names. Thus,
a girl of two and a half years, named Ilse, used to say, _Ilse mein
Tuhl_ (Ilse, my chair), instead of "mein Stuhl" (Bardeleben). My boy of
two and three fourths years repeated the "I" he heard, meaning by it
"you." In the twenty-ninth month _mir_ (me) was indeed said by him, but
not "ich" (I), (p. 171). Soon, however, he named himself no more, as he
had done in the twenty-third and even in the twenty-eighth month (pp.
147-167), by his first name. In the thirty-third month especially came
_das will ich! das moecht ich!_ (I wish that, I should like that) (p.
183). The fourfold designation of his own person in the thirty-second
month (p. 180)--by his name, by "I," by "he," and by the omission of all
pronouns--was only a brief transition-stage, as was also the
misunderstanding of the "dein" (your) which for a time (p. 156) meant
"gross" (large).
These observations plainly show that the "I"-feeling is not first
awakened by the learning of words, for this feeling, according to the
facts given above, is present much earlier; but by means of speech the
_conceptual_ distinction of the "I," the self, the mine, is first made
exact; the development, not the origin, of the "I"-feeling is simply
favored.
How obscure the "I"-concept is even after learning the use of the
personal pronouns is shown by the utterance of the four-year-old
daughter of Lindner, named Olga, _die hat mich nass gemacht_ (she has
made me wet), when she meant that she herself had done it; and _du
sollst mir doch folgen, Olga_ (but you must follow me, Olga), the latter
expression, indeed, being merely said after some one else. In her is
noteworthy, too, the confounding of the possessives "his" and "her,"
e. g., _dem Papa ihr Buch auf der Mama seinen Platz gelegt_ (her book,
papa's, laid in his place, mamma's) (Lindner); and yet in these forms of
speech there is an advance in the differentiation of the concepts.
All children are known to be late in beginning to speak about
themselves, of what they wish to become, or of that which they can
do better than others can, and the like. The _ego_ has become an
experience of consciousness long before this.
All these progressive steps, which in the individual can be traced only
with great pains, form, as it were, converging lines that culminate in
the fully developed feeling of the personality as exclusive, as distinct
from the outer world.
Thus much the purely physiological view can admit without hesitation;
but a further unification or indivisibility or unbroken permanence of
the child's _ego_, it can not reconcile with the facts, perfectly well
established by me, that are presented in this chapter.
For what is the significance of the fact, that "to the child his feet,
hands, teeth, seem a plaything foreign to himself"? and that "the child
bit his own arm as he was accustomed to bite objects with which he was
not acquainted"? "Seem" to what part of the child? What is that which
bites in the child as in the very young chick that seizes its own toe
with its bill and bites it as if it were the toe of its neighbor or a
grain of millet? Evidently the "subject" in the head is a different one
from that in the trunk. The _ego_ of the brain is other than the _ego_
of the spinal marrow (the "spinal-marrow-soul" of Pflueger). The one
speaks, sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels; the other merely feels,
and at the beginning, so long as brain and spinal marrow have only a
loose organic connection and no functional connection at all with each
other, the two _egos_ are absolutely isolated from each other.
Newly-born children with no brain, who lived for hours and days, as I
myself saw in a case of rare interest, could suck, cry, move the limbs,
and feel (for they stopped crying and took to sucking when something
they could suck was put into their mouths when they were hungry). On the
other hand, if a human being could be born with a brain but without a
spinal marrow and could live, it would not be able to move its limbs.
When a normal babe, therefore, plays with its feet or bites itself in
the arm as it would bite a biscuit, we have in this a proof that the
brain with its perceptive apparatus is independent of the spinal marrow.
And the fact that acephalic new-born human beings and animal embryos
deprived of brain, as Soltmann and I found, move their limbs just as
sound ones do, cry just as they do, suck and respond to reflexes, proves
that the functions of the spinal marrow (inclusive of the optic thalami,
the corpora quadrigemina and the cervical marrow) are independent of the
cerebral hemispheres (together with the corpus striatum, according to
Soltmann).
Now, however, the brainless living child that sucks, cries, moves arms
and legs, and distinguishes pleasure from displeasure, has indisputably
an individuality, an _ego_. We must, then, of necessity admit two _egos_
in the child that has both cerebrum and spinal marrow, and that
represents to himself his arm as good to taste of, as something to like.
But, if two, why not several? At the beginning, when the centers of
sight, hearing, smell, and taste, in the brain are still imperfectly
developed, each of these perceives for itself, the perceptions in the
different departments of sense having as yet no connection at all with
one another. The case is like that of the spinal marrow, which at first
does not communicate, or only very imperfectly communicates, to the
brain that which it feels, e. g., the effect of the prick of a needle,
for the newly born do not generally react upon that. Only by means of
very frequent coincidences of unlike sense-impressions, in
tasting-and-touching, seeing-and-feeling, seeing-and-hearing,
seeing-and-smelling, tasting-and-smelling, hearing-and-touching, are the
intercentral connecting fibers developed, and then first can the various
representational centers, these "I"-makers, as it were, contribute, as
in the case of the ordinary formation of concepts, to the formation of
the corporate "I," which is quite abstract.
This abstract "I"-concept, that belongs only to the adult, thinking
human being, comes into existence in exactly the same way that other
concepts do, viz., by means of the individual ideas from which it
results, as e. g., the forest exists only when the trees exist. The
subordinate "I's," that preside over the separate sense-departments, are
in the little child not yet blended together, because in him the organic
connections are still lacking; which, being translated into the language
of psychology, means that he lacks the necessary power of abstraction.
The co-excitations of the sensory centers, that are as yet impressed
with too few memory-images, can not yet take place on occasion of a
single excitation, the cerebral connecting fibers being as yet too
scanty.
These co-excitations of parts of the brain functionally different, on
occasion of excitation of a part of the brain that has previously often
been excited together with those, form the physiological foundation of
the psychical phenomenon of the formation of concepts in general, and so
of the formation of the "I"-concept. For the special ideas of all
departments of sense have in all beings possessed of all the senses--or
of four senses, or of three--the common quality of coming into existence
only under conditions of time, space, and causality. This common
property presupposes similar processes in every separate sense-center of
the highest rank. Excitations of one of these centers easily effect
similar co-excitations of centers that have often been excited together
with them through objective impressions, and it is this similar
co-excitement extending itself over the cerebral centers of all the
nerves of sense that evokes the composite idea of the "I."
According to this view, therefore, the "I" can not exist as a unit, as
undivided, as uninterrupted; it exists only when the separate
departments of sense are active with their _egos_, out of which the "I"
is abstracted; e. g., it disappears in dreamless sleep. In the waking
condition it has continued existence only where the centro-sensory
excitations are most strongly in force; i. e., where the attention is on
the strain.
Still less, however, is the "I" an aggregate. For this presupposes the
exchangeability of the component parts. The seeing _ego_, however, can
just as little have its place made good by a substitute as can the
hearing one, the tasting one, etc. The sum-total of the separate leaves,
blossoms, stalks, roots, of the plant does not, by a great deal,
constitute the plant. The parts must be joined together in a special
manner. So, likewise, it is not enough to add together the
characteristics common to the separate sense-representations in order to
obtain from these the regulating and controlling "I." Rather there
results from the increasing number and manifoldness of the
sense-impressions a continually increasing growth of the gray substance
of the child's cerebrum, a rapid increase of the intercentral connecting
fibers, and through this a readier co-excitement--association, so
called--which unites feeling with willing and thinking in the child.
This union is the "I," the sentient and emotive, the desiring and
willing, the perceiving and thinking "I."