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(1982).

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 30:827-848

Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self, with Particular Emphasis on the Body Self
Margaret S. Mahler, M.D. and John B. McDevitt, M.D.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE of self is an eminently personal internal experience that is difficult, if not impossible, to trace to its beginnings by observational studies or by reconstruction in psychoanalysis. It reveals itself by its failure much more readily than by its normal variations. In trying to trace the emergence of the sense of selfparticularly the body selfduring the first fifteen months of life, we have relied as much on inferences drawn from observations of pathological phenomena as we have on the behavior of normal infants in later stages of development (see Bonnard, 1958). In the last decades, we have learned a great deal about the relative maturity of the newborn's and very young infant's perceptual apparatus, about his active participation in the earliest stages of the motherinfant interactions. Brazelton (1981), Emde et al. (1976), Stern (1976), and a host of otherneonatologists and investigators of earliest infant development have furnished us with data that lend themselves to farreaching hypotheses concerning the young infant's "separate self" and his quasi-inborn "competency." In contrast, we adhere to Weil's (1976) way of drawing metapsychological inferences from data of infant observation. Furthermore, it has been the hallmark of our normative research project (as well as that of the infantile psychosis study) that we paid particular attention to the progression of the infant's self through the interactive polarization within the mother-infant symbiosis and through the separationindividuation process. Whereas there is no conceivable method by which the validity of the hypothesis of a symbiotic phase of the mother-infant dual unity can be proven, it is just as impossible, we think, to empathetically or otherwise provide or militate for acceptance of the contrary hypothesis namely, that the infant of a few weeks "knows" or even "feels" that it is his self that reacts to stimuli emanating from the "other," or that he can in any way discern them from stimuli arising intrinsically within his own body. Even if viewed from a purely biological point of view, the newborn infant is only a partial system: between the distress signal and the relief of need, there must be amother. We have taken (Mahler, 1968b), as did Benedek (1949), (1959) and many others, a similar view as far as the psychological approach to the mother-infant unit is concerned. Most developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts regard the caregiver, the "other," as the outer half of the self: Spitz gave the outer half of the self the name "external" or "auxiliary" ego; whereas we regard the caregiver, the mother, as the symbiotic half of the mother-child dual unit. We agree with Loewald (1980), who describes the original mother-child unit as a field of interacting psychological forces: out of the interactions of such forces, there is a gradual differentiation of instinctual drives, objects, and inner structures. The child more and more constitutes himself and is constituted as an independent field, though still in interaction with the centers of activity in hisenvironment. In his 1923 paper Freud stated that the egowe believe he meant the self"is first and foremost a bodily ego" (p. 26). We agree with A.-M. Sandler (1977) that the sense of self has experiential and structural aspects. However, we recognize the largely descriptive, experiential nature of the "sense of self," and a metapsychological conceptualization of "self" is not implied (Blum, 1982). The infant's earliest sense of himself is conveyed, from the beginning, through sensations from within his own body, especially by proprioception. This statement seemingly neglects contributions from tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations arising from the surface of the lips, the tongue, the nasal mucosa, and so on. What we want to stress, however, is that the available observational evidence points to the conclusion that at this very earliest developmental stage, proprioception, with minimal influence from sensory inputs, conveys the first glimmerings of a primitive core of a body self (Benjamin, 1961); (Tennes et al., 1972). According to evidence from encephalograms, as well as clinical observations of the beginnings of extrauterine life, there is a quickening of the infant's sensoryperception in the "vulnerable period" between three to four and six to seven weeks (Tennes et al., 1972). In the following weeks, it would seem, the enteroproprioceptivebody sensations receive accretions from sensory stimuli and gradually become integrated with them into primitive body schemata. These weeks correspond to the ones recently designated the "fussing" period. With the spurt of cathexis of the sensoriperceptive organs, stimuli from the outside world gain perceptual ascendancy, but the infant only gradually discerns these as derived from sources

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beyond the "self." These sensoriperceptive stimuli facilitate the infant's ability to delimit the selfschemata from the surroundings, and, thus, eventually boundaries of the self-image are formed. Years ago (Mahler, 1968b), we called attention to the importance of this first shift of cathexis from the inside of the body to the sensoriperceptive rind of the ego, to which Benjamin referred in 1961. We emphasized that this shift is a sine qua non of self-boundary formation and delimitation of the body self from the "other"the caregiverand from the surroundings. It is also the first step in the differentiation of the originally fused symbiotic self-object schemata. This is a part of the routine structuralization process, which does not take place in the psychotic infant of either the autistic or the symbiotic type because for those psychotic infants the symbiotic partner, the mother as beacon of orientation, does not exist. We feel that one comes nearer to understanding the routine structuralization mechanisms in the normal child by extrapolating from our studies of autistic psychotic children, in whom, as a cruel twist of nature, developmental lines are dissociated. In one autistic child whom we studied this defect of the under ordinary circumstancessilent shift of cathexis was brought to our attention by dint of its bizarre distortion (Mahler, 1968b). A five-year-old psychotic child, Lotta, who had been in treatment from the age of three years, two months, was given by her therapist a small flashlight with which she could endlessly practice the turning "on" and turning "off" operation. After the treatment session, when her mother was driving her home, Lotta got hold of the glowing cigarette lighter in the car and put it to her lips, severely scorching them. Without a whimper, she let herself be driven to the doctor, who put stitches in her lips. At the same time, contrariwise, the therapist was able to discern each time themotheragainst advicegave her child laxatives, inasmuch as Lotta behaved during those sessions as if she were possessed by bad introjects (literally located in her belly): she squirmed, whined, appeared bewildered, and could not be soothed.
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Physiological anomalies in child psychosis similar to that described above are well known; they include this very lack of peripheral pain sensitivity and at the same time great hypersensitivity to enteroceptive stimuli, as illustrated by the vignette of Lotta. Due to the failure of sensoriperceptive stimuli to gain ascendancy over enteroceptive stimuli, which is probably due to, but at any rate coincides with the psychotic infant's inability to utilize the mother as beacon of orientation, a vicious cycle is created. The interactions, from which the sense of "self" ultimately derives, are obstructed in their development from the very start (see also what we describe later in this paper: aggressivization of the skin and skull). Schilder (1923), in his classic oeuvre, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (p. 7), stated that the schema of the body develops and is maintained within the ever-changing alternation and continual interplay of the body and the environment, by tactile, kinesthetic, visual, and vestibular impressions or stimuli. Hence, if a severe imbalance between inside and peripheral sensitivity exists, the body-image formation is bound to be seriously impaired. We owe reconstructive inferences of less extremebody-schema distortions to Greenacre, who also taught us about the question of identity in relation to individuation. Greenacre (1958) emphasized that "the sense of the self is maintained and perhaps vitalized by the continual redefinement which accompanies comparison and contrast with others" (p. 614). The average healthy human being is not conscious or, rather, not self-conscious, of his or her proprioceptive sensations. We do seem to require boundary sensations, however, and these are conveyed largely by way of the skin as well as by our other sensoriperceptive organs. The eventual self-boundary formation derives from touch, smell, taste, sight, and the coming of age of motor coordination, which complements the important vestibular kinesthetic positional schemata of our selves. Hartmann and Schilder (1927) wrote that sensations, the subjective experiencing of our body, do not derive as such from or on the surface of the body. They derive from zones about one fifth to four fifths of an inch below the surface. Also, the orifices of the body are located subjectively under the surface. At the same time, our immediate experience of the inside of our bodies has nothing to do with organs. We perceive merely a heavy mass. As far as the parts of the body are concerned, we have only a sense of gravity. To these sensations of gravity are added bodily sensations around the orifices or zones. Schilder and Wechsler (1935) investigated the ideas children have about the insides of their bodies. Although their sample was not very large or representative, the results seemed to suggest that the normal child pays little attention to the inside of his or her body and is more attentive to its periphery. Some of the older children, however, when asked what was under their skins and inside their bodies, did say, "I, myself!" Schilder and Wechsler remark (p. 36): "It is one of the paradoxes of our bodily

experience that our sensations relate to the surface of the body, and yet we do not regard this (the actual surface) as our body proper We are inside our skins and know nothing directly of the interior of our bodies." With regard to our feelings about our body as a whole, we sometimes think of our skin as our most basic possession, emblematic of our very self, and sometimes as "merely the envelope of our true self and of what is inside us. But in the deep, infantile strata of our minds we are not perfectly certain whether there is anything inside us except what is crammed into us from the outside." The core of our sense of individual entity and identity is dependent on integration of partial body-self schematathis is a gradual process and behavioral referents barely exist. As the foregoing quotations from Hartmann and Schilder (1927) and Schilder and Wechsler (1935) adumbrate, different parts of the body are sensed differently. They also seem to be in varying degrees suitable to be integrated into the whole body image by the synthetic function of the ego. We shall return to this problem later.
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We might hypothesize the existence of two groups of bodyself schemata. One group concerns mechanisms of self-boundary formation. The other concernsintegration of body part schemata into a whole body image by the synthetic function of the ego, as Schilder has described. The importance of libidinization of the baby's body by the earliest contact perceptual ministrations of the mother has been emphasized by Hoffer (1950). The sensoriperceptive interchange not only helps differentiation and thus eventually separation-individuation, but seems to be a sine qua non of the earliest sense of the bodyself as entity. This in fact seems to be the condition on which the feeling of "being alive" rests. When, as in infantile psychosis, the mother's libidinal ministrations are not perceived, boundary sensations and the sense of "being alive" appear to be missing. One of the conspicuous results of this vital deficiency can be observed in psychotic children (particularly of school age) who in order to "feel alive" compensate with aggressivization of their skin and skull. We find some of these children vehemently scratching the skin of their arms or legs, resulting in discolored deep scar formationor we have to outfit some psychotic children with a helmet as they insist on diving full-force, head-on onto the hard surface of the floor or the pavement. That these manifestations are the result of the gravest disintegration of instinctual drives and failure of integration can be only mentioned in this paper. The importance of the integration of part images of the body into a whole self-image is apparent from the pervasiveness and strength of restitutive mechanisms, which are brought to bear when the integrity of the body image as a whole is threatened, and from the fact that they are found in nonpsychotic adults as well. We are thinking of those patients who, because they have without anticipationsuddenly lost a limb, develop the phantom-limb phenomenon. In the Rorschach test with such patients, a proliferation (up to 100 percent) of anatomical, most frequently anatomical position answers were found by Judith Kestenberg and the senior author of this paper. This finding eloquently proved that those phantom-limb patients were continually preoccupied with compensatory efforts to restore the body image. One of the restitution mechanisms seemed to be precisely the phantom-limb formation (see Mahler and Silberpfenning, 1938); (Ptzl, 1924); (Kolb, 1954). In his paper "Castration Anxiety and the Body Ego," Lfgren (1968) dealt with the issue of a close, intimate correlation between the voluntary motor innervation of body parts and phantom phenomena. He elaborated that, in contrast to the extremities, body parts that have no voluntary, but rather involuntary motility, do not produce compensatory phantom phenomena, or only very rarely. From that, Lfgren drew the conclusion that, where there is no voluntary intentional movementas for example in the case of the penisthere is no phantom. The penis, through its highly autonomous status, obtains an object quality vis vis the rest of the self, the result of which is that it remains rather insecurely anchored in the body image; that is to say, it eludes the synthetic function of the ego. Clinical data from the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients of Lfgren and of other authors bear witness that the tumescence of the penisits erectile potentiality against the law of gravitycertainly adds to its being a less securely anchored part of the body self than are our limbsan attribute of the penis that contributes to castration anxiety. The importance of voluntary intentional movement for the process of body-part integration by the synthetic function of the ego is highlighted by still another pathological phenomenon: the tic paroxysms in Gilles de la Tourette's disease. The psychosomatic pathological mechanism in tiqueurs involves synergic groups of striate muscles. Striate muscles ordinarily work in a coordinated way as the organs of voluntary motility par excellence; instead, in Gilles de la Tourette's disease, they take on an object, and automatic erotized quality, and move volitionally (Mahler, Luke, and Daltroff, 1945) ; they

elude control by the ego and thus integration into the body image. Patients with tic syndrome refer to the affected parts of their body as "it." They complain that "it" moves in spite of their trying to keep the groups of muscles from moving; they describe how they are utterly unable to control those muscle groups. They feel powerless vis vis the involuntary innervations of these muscle groups of their own body. Those innervations which give rise to automatic involuntary discharge movements are nearer to the id, to instinctual discharge or affectomotility. They escape the ego's control of performance-motilitythe function of mastery which Freud (1923) singled out as the most important for the mature ego. The tic paroxysms are felt as overwhelming to the motility-controlling function of the egoso much so that the continual assault to the ego occasionally results in the child tiqueur's breakdown in psychosis with the onset of puberty. The question arises whether in the first weeks of preintentionality the baby might not experience the earliest movements of parts of his body as involuntary or as not clearly voluntary. Along similar lines, it would be logical to assume that at first the infant experiences those parts of his body, such as hands or feet, as objects, as not belonging to him, just as the penis is experienced as an object. We are reminded of Loewenstein's (1950) description of a ten-month-old baby's discovery of and affective reactions to his penis. Early developmental psychologists, as well as we, agree that activity is the most important trigger of the developing sense of self. The trigger for the first pattern ofactivity of the newborn and very likely the fetus in utero is the sucking reflex, which the touch of the cheek elicits much earlier than vision. Gesell and Ilg (1937)established that until the second quarter of the first year, sucking depends entirely on touch and only later is elicited, in addition, by the sight of the breast or bottle. By twelve weeks of age the hand seems to be helping the mouth. The mouth is both a receptive and an encompassing, grasping body part. Both mouth and hand are prehensile organs. From sixteen weeks on, the hand not only grasps semiintentionally, but the infant looks at his fingers, moves them, and playfully examines them visually, most probably without realizing they belong to his own body. At that age (four months or so), the baby does finger and touch his own fingers. Hoffer has drawn attention to the fact that this "double touch" becomes a lesson in self-discovery. Through sensations conveyed by his own tactile organs, the infant comes to appreciate what his fingers are, through the sense of "double touch." He also comes to appreciate that objects are different. As far as objects are concerned, Monakow (see Stirnimann, 1947) has established the important innate faculty of the human race, of discriminating the animate from the inanimate by touch from the very beginning. He gave this inborn faculty the term protodiakrisis. Stirnimann(1947) made an interesting experiment with neonates. He exposed newborns to first: the human finger; second: a phantom finger, such as a stuffed finger-shape calfskin glove, which simulated the human finger; and third: a wooden stick. Most babies grasped and held onto the finger, 15 percent held on to the phantom finger, and all dropped the stick immediately. That is what Monakow has termed the inborn protodiakrisis of the human being (but it also seems to be somewhat similar to discrimination of the animate and the inanimate by animals). There is an important early connection, biologically and phylogenetically encoded in the neonate's response to the human face, hands, and fingers versus inanimate objects as well, which has, as recent studies have indicated, certain corresponding areas in the human brain (Geschwind, 1979). In some of our film sequences of the differentiation and early practicing subphase, we find naturalistic demonstrations of ongoing integration of hand (touch), mouth (touch and taste), and vision, i.e., into the body schema; they seem to parallel, i.e., they are going on simultaneously with the infant's exploratory activities with mouth, eyes, and hands. It is in the second and third quarter of the first year that the hands function more independently of the mouth; they function more and more under the influence of the eyes; they have become tools that control the outside world. They have become a most active extension of the growing body self. So far we offered some thoughts on the development of the sense of self emanating from within the bodyinferred and combined with whatever data seemed relevant to understanding intrinsic roots of the development of the body self. Parallel with the primitive self-schemata from within, however, the sense of self receives accretions by the process of creation of the libidinal object, that aspect of the emergence of the bodily sense of self which our project most heavily leaned upon. In our study we have found that the sense of self seems to develop parallel with the schemata the infant appears to create of the libidinal object. We tried to draw inferences about these schemata from the infant's attachment behavior to and recognition memory of the mother (Mahler, 1979); (Mahler et al., 1975); (McDevitt, 1975). To find comparable data regarding the infant's feelings, perceptions, and thoughts about himself is much more difficult than about the love object.

In other words, we assume the infant has two basic points of reference from which he builds up his self-schemata: (1) his own inner feelings (or states) forming the primitive core of the self, on the one handand (2) his sensing of the care-giving by the libidinal object, on the other hand. We wish to emphasize that, insofar as the infant's development of his sense of self takes place in the context of his dependence on the mother, the sense of self that results will bear the imprint of her care-giving. During symbiosis and the differentiation subphase the care-giver's "mirroring" is a most important ingredient in the development of the sense of self (Winnicott). Hence, to try to speak of selfdevelopment separately from the development of object relations imposes an impossible strain on the data. Equally artificial is the attempt to separate out the perceptive and cognitive from the affective elements responsible for the demarcation of the body self from the object world.
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II
One of the methods we used to follow the infant's developing sense of self was observation of his behavior in front of the mirror. Our nursery was equipped with a readily accessible floor-length mirror, at the base of which there was a large mattress. General impressions derived from the observations of the reactions and behaviors of nine infants as they observed themselves in the mirror form the basis for the inferences that follow. It should be added that these infants were free to observe and to learn about their mirror image both in the setting of the separation-individuation study and at home. We assume that the infant who is to become a "separate self" experiences a variety of sensations and feeling states along the pleasure-unpleasure continuum within the framework of the motherchild relationship. These include the pleasure the baby experiences in his relationship with his mother, with his transitional object, with hisbody and its functions. It also includes such unpleasurable experiences in his relationship with his mother as bodily distress, stranger anxiety, and separation anxiety. At the same time that the infant develops a nonspecific attachment to and a recognition memory of the human face by three months of age,1 he also shows considerable interest in moving, staring at, examining, playing with, and mouthing fingers and hands and, slightly later, toes and feet. By the time he has developed a specific attachment to and recognition memory of the mother at four to five months, the infant's behavior suggests that he has also developed a specific attachment to andrecognition memory of parts of his own body: he shows an increased interest in the body parts and a certain familiarity with them. Although there is a similarity in the manner in which the infant examines the mother's (and later the "other's") face visually and by touch ("customs inspection") and the way in which

1 Ages are approximate and vary from child to child.

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he examines and familiarizes himself with his own body, it should be pointed out that during the entire differentiation subphaseunder average expectable conditionshe appears to direct by far greater attention to the mother than to himself. The infant seems to sense that the mother is the one who brings about pleasurable, and who relieves unpleasurable, body feelings. In short the mother, in addition to being a check point for differentiation, has become indispensable for the infant's sense of wellbeing (Sandler, 1960). From four to five months the infant becomes exquisitely interested in the care-giver's face particularly the eyes, the mouth, and the smile. It is at this time that he studies with interest the same features of his own face in the mirror. We infer that the infant's perception of himself in the mirror has the two points of reference mentioned earlier: an inner, probably mainly kinesthetic and vestibular root, and an outer layer consisting of visual-perceptual engrams. From five to six months on the infant begins to pay attention to the movement of his fingers, hands, and arms as they are reflected in the mirror. In addition, the infant shifts his gaze back and forth between the mirror reflection of his own face and the face of the mother or of an observer in the mirror and, shortly thereafter, also to the actual mother or to an observer standing by. The infant's behavior in front of the mirror is similar to, although more complex than, the comparative scanning (looking from one object to another at a distance), checking back (looking back to the mother's face as a point of reference after looking at the "other-than-mother" world), and customs inspection described elsewhere (Mahler, 1979); (Mahler and McDevitt, 1968).

The amount of interest and the time spent looking at the mirror image of his own face and body, as opposed to the mother's and observer's, varied from month to month and from child to child. From five to seven months the emphasis was on the reflection of the own face and body, but two children, who showed a particularly strong need for their mothers, paid more attention to the mother's mirror image than to their own.
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Beginning at six months of age the feedback through the mirror reflection elicited, in addition, considerable excitement. This excitement was more marked when the infant looked at his own face and movements, perhaps because they were more novel and more predictably elicited, than when looking at the mother's mirror image. Occasionally we noticed that the infant had a fuller smile for the actual mother than he had for the mirror image of the mother. We found it noteworthy also that the excitement at mirroring feedback was especially marked in, more important to, and also more actively sought by, babies in whom the mother's investment had been poor. By eight months of age the novelty of examining his own body parts by touching and handling them wore off. By contrast, the infant became more interested in and even more excited than before by his own mirror image. Unlike his diminished tactile and visual direct handling of his own body parts, the baby showed increased interest in initiating and observing the reflection of his coordinated movements and his facial expressions. The infant waved his arms, moved his body, rocked and kicked his feet, and smiled broadly while looking at his mirror image. The excited movements and smiles as seen by himself in the mirror were reflected back to himself, probably acting as a continuous feedback, a reliable source of stimulation. By nine to twelve months we inferred from the infant's total behavior further progress in the integration of the body image. This was demonstrated by behavior before the mirror. Whereas he still sometimes showed excited enjoyment, more often than before he soberly checked the image and the movements of his limbs with the by then more familiar image of his face as a point of reference. Although earlier the baby probably had a recognition memory of his own mirror image as another, albeit familiar, infant, he now began to sense that self-initiated movements were in some way related to a more integrated sense of himself (Gesell and Ames, 1947). This vague awareness of the mirror image reflecting the baby's own self seemed to be disturbing at times, for during these same several months the
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infant sometimes became fussy, looked away from, or lost interest in the mirror. In studying our data we noticed a clustering of such avoidance behaviors in most of the infants at various times during the ten- to fourteen-month period. Our speculation is that the infant was disturbed, confused, and perplexed by an uncertain and fluctuatingrecognition, that the familiar "other infant" observed in the mirror began now to be dimly recognized as a reflection of himself, although not yet himself in the flesh. This phenomenon reminds us of the perplexity and distress when an infant recognizes that another person is particularly similar to yet somewhat different from the mother(Mahler and McDevitt, 1968). In studying our data of infants between twelve and eighteen months of age we found that the infant became increasingly aware that the figure he saw in the mirror was indeed himself. By this time, or a little later, when asked, he was able to identify the mirror image by using either his name or a personal pronoun, or by pointing to his chest (see also Lewis and Brooks, 1978). According to Piaget (1937), the infant at this time, between twelve and eighteen months, begins to know cognitively that he exists separately and that he causes things to happen, that is, has an effect on the environment (Yarrow, 1972). Whereas the "double touch" is, according to Hoffer, the young infant's first lesson in bodily tactile self-discoverythe fact that the one-year-old can now readily, predictably, and consistently bring about intended behaviors and expressions in his mirror reflection seemed to point to the probability that the visual and kinesthetic self-schemata are now of a perceptually and cognitively higher order, which very likely augments his self-awareness.

III
The infant's first discoveries of inanimate objects in the "out there" seem to depend in part on his ability to reach for them, grasp them, and manipulate them. Awareness of his excited
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straining to do things on his own and to take the next maturational step all of which belong to the developmental track of individuationcontribute to his sense of separateness. It is during the practicing subphase proper (from ten to fifteen months) that the infant's innate maturational pressure toward individuation and autonomy contributes most clearly to his sense of entity and identity. As the infant explores the animate and inanimate world with all sensory modalities, he learns more and more about himself and his relation to the outside world. During the early practicing period he learned that he can propel himself in space by flexing and extending his arms and legs. Encounters with the inanimate objects in the environment helped to firm up and delineate body-self boundaries. The baby experienced pleasure or pain in coming into contact with and exploring, or passively enduring, the outer world as hard, unyielding, and at times hurtful. Now during the practicing subphase the infant acquires a practical sensorimotor (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969) and sensoriaffective schema of himself, which is sufficiently positive and autonomous to enable the practice of motor activities and the exploration of the ever-expanding environment at greater distances from the mother. How the infant feels about himself during the practicing subphase depends on both subphaseadequate mothering and fathering and on his autonomous achievements. If adequate, these experiences create sound secondary narcissism consisting of self-love, primitive valuation of his own accomplishments, and omnipotence(Spruiell, 1975). At the same time the constructive use of aggression (ever so often experienced with some degree of anger) promotes turning passive into active and contributes to physical distancing of self and objects, that is to say, the achievement of a distinct and separate sense of self. Toward the end of the practicing subphase the infant was observed to behave as if he were "thinking over" and "choosing" several possible activities or toys before committing himself. It seemed that intentionality which began much earlier (Weil, 1976) now took on an element of choice; at this time the intentionality
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was not so completely dependent on maturational forces or on the immediacy of stimuli as it had been hitherto, i.e., it was no longer stimulus-bound. We suspect that the sense of self as agent (Schafer, 1968), along with the awareness of initiating or terminating actions, communications, sensations, and feeling states, contributes significantly to an independent sense of self. One of the most important consequences of the sense of self as agent is the infant's ability to internalize some of the mother's organizing patterns of behaviorher soothing activities. These internalizations eventually play a significant role in shaping the nature of the body self. At the same time the infant begins to show behaviors indicative of empathy, clearly indicating a new level of distinction between the self and the object. Two brief clinical vignettes, selected from a wealth of observational data, will illustrate that the developing infant and toddler has comparable feelings about the selfand the object world and that disturbances in one area are likely to be accompanied by disturbances in the other. During his sixth month, Peter, an infant with good endowment and solid development, created a transitional object, a blanket. When he saw his blanket he gurgled with delight, much as he gurgled and cooed when his mother came to him. In his seventh and eighth months he explored the faces of people other than his mother visually and tactilely with interest and curiosity; similarly, he continued to explore his own body and took great pleasure studying himself and his body movements in the mirror. In his ninth month he made a new discovery: he located his penis while being bathed. The mother thought he felt no special pleasure in touching his penis at that time, that he treated it much as he did other parts of his body. In his thirteenth month, however, he rediscovered his penis with great delight (cf. Loewenstein, 1950). He enjoyed pulling on it with pleasure during his bath. On one occasion, while being diapered, Peter was quite irritable and began to yank at
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his diaper. Accidentally he got hold of his penis. His expression immediately changed to one of pleasure and excitement. For the next several months whenever Peter touched his penis he squealed with delight in the same manner that continued to be characteristic of his response to hismother, to his transitional object, and particularly to his mirror image. In addition, he responded similarly to a fold of fat on his thigh just above the knee. In Peter's case, as in all the normal children studied, it is clear that the feelings directed toward the object world, whether they were positive or negative, were similar to, if not the same as, feelings

directed toward the developing self. The similarity in feeling did not apply, however, to children with less than optimal mothering. Harriet's relationship with her narcissistic, immature, unempathic mother was poor from the beginning of her life. From as early as five months she showed little interest or curiosity in animate or inanimate objects. She was frequently observed, however, to derive pleasure from rocking herself. Harriet at six months, in contrast to her continued lack of interest in people, responded to her mirror image with great excitement and pleasure. She waved her arms, made faces, and accompanied her activity with squeaks of unmistakable joy. Nothing matched the excitement and pleasure with which she looked at her mirror image. From six to ten months, Harriet seemed to find her mirror image more reliably responsive than her detached mother. Her lack of interest in other people or things suggested that her excitement and pleasure in her mirror image did not reflect a positive relation with her mother, as it had with Peter and other children. It seemed, instead, to be a continuation of the self-stimulation we had observed earlier. We ought to add that the negative reaction often observed in children between ten and fourteen months old when they look in the mirror was present in an exaggerated degree in Harriet. She seemed particularly uncomfortable, self-conscious, and shy when staring at herself in the mirror and avoided doing so by immediately looking away.
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SUMMARY
In trying to trace the emergence of the sense of self during the first fifteen months of lifein particular the formation of the bodily selfwe used, on the one hand, severe dissociations of the integral parts of the body self such as occurs in psychosis, in the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, and in phantomlimb disturbances and, on theother hand, data from our normative study of the separation-individuation process as inferred from mother-infant interaction in general and the infant's behavior in front of the mirror in particular. The infant's behavior in front of the mirror strongly suggests that feelings about himself only gradually become integrated with perceptual and cognitive awareness of himself. All the data, furthermore, indicate that it is not possible to study the development of the self separate from the development of the object. All inferences contained in our paper about the emergence of the sense of self were made from the point of view of the central organizing, integrating, and synthesizing institution of the mind, that is, the ego. We agree with other authors that the developing self has both experiential and structural aspects. We titled our paper "Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self" to indicate that this paper is meant to be an initial and quite tentative communication about the vast and elusive area of personality development concerning the emergence of our bodily self, and thus of the core of our personal identity.

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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]


Mahler, M.S. and McDevitt, J.B. (1982). Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self, with Particular Emphasis on the Body Self. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 30:827-848

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