In Chapter 5 of The Motherhood
Constellation, Daniel Stern traces the path from mother’s overt behaviour to the
infant’s subjective experience, or his way of representing interpersonal events. Stern is aware of the
difficulties ahead: “When thinking about infants, we are far less sure what such
representations are and how they get there" (i.e., in the infant’s mind). (p.
79). The first problem is the nature of social interaction. Inanimate events
can be described in the standard Aristotelian model of incoming forms:
There are
several important differences between the representations of inanimate physical
happenings and those of subjective interpersonal happenings. For inanimate
physical happenings, the mental events in a representation are thought to be
isomorphic with the real events: they are simply performed virtually on an
internal stage. (Stern, The motherhood constellation, 1995, p. 80)
Joint interpersonal actions have several
features that make this straightforward model inadequate. Stern lists six,
which I will not reproduce here. Taken together, they make up a particular format
of, or a placeholder for representations that Stern calls “schema-of-being-with-another”. It can be
seen as an elaboration of his earlier description of “Representations
of Interactions that have been Generalized” or RIGs. Stern warns of equating representations with
the relatively simple idea of internalising interactions and adopts a strictly Kantian
position:
...these
representations are not formed from external events or persons that have been internalized. They are not put inside
from the outside. They are constructed from the inside, from the
self-experience of being with another. Nothing is taken in. (ibid., p. 81)
I admire Stern’s bold precision
even if by being so explicit he paints himself into the corner. Now he is faced
with the issue by what means does the infant construct the internal
representations of interactive events. In a truly Kantian manner Stern has to
assume a number of innate "principles of judgment” or schemas that do
the job for the infant.
What
fundamental formats for representing already exist to account for each of the
basic elements of an experience as well as to tie them together? Taking each
element separately, we have perceptual schemas (e.g., visual images) and we
have conceptual schemas (e.g., symbols and words)... Piaget introduced the sensorimotor
schema, which added motor acts and their coordination with sensory experiences
as yet another fundamental way of representing experience. More recently,
another basic form of human representation available to children has been
added, namely, an invariant sequence of events that is represented as a single
script... (ibid., p. 82)
These four representational
formats are necessary but not sufficient for the construction of the
schema-of-being-with-another. Hence, Stern adds two more. The first is a placeholder for the temporal contour of affects, called “feeling shape”
and the second has the intriguing name of a “protonarrative envelope”. It is
needed in order to make sense of the five other formats in terms of meaning:
...the
diverse events and feelings are tied together as necessary elements of a single
unified happening that, at one of its higher levels, assumes a meaning.
The
problem with this and other such solutions is how the meaning, even a very
primitive one, slips in or gets assigned or is constructed from the pieces.
There is a way out of this dilemma, and that is to assume that there is yet
another fundamental way of representing human events, a sixth schema made up of
“acts of meaning”, as Bruner and others have argued. (Ibid., p. 89)
As Jari Kaukua and Taneli Kukkonen
pointed out in their article ”Sense perception and self-awareness” , an Aristotelian
model of sense perception unavoidably necessitates an assumption of mental
faculties that unite the disparate information conveyed by the senses. “What is it that allows us to go beyond mere sensations of red,
fragrant, and smooth and to recognise an apple for an apple?” (Kaukua &
Kukkonen, 2007, p. 96). Stern’s list of six representational formats summarises
modern conceptions in cognitive developmental psychology, but as a solution to the puzzle
it has ancient roots. I will get back to these in my next post.
