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As I wrote in my introductory paragraph, the focus of this discussion will be on the subtle and complex problems of the very language with which we put forth our various and divergent views. Sometimes it is our language that separates us more than do our ideas.
There is the “apples and oranges” problem. “Analogous to” is not “same as.” We get into conceptual difficulties when we equate the psychological world of the infant to that of an adult, when we equate the “possible self” of the neonate with the “true self” of the adult. An egg is not a chicken and a chick is not a rooster, despite the fact that the DNA is the same. Despite the phenomenon of “regression,” the rooster cannot become an egg again. As a close observer of infants and their subsequent development, I can see what I call the “intrinsic self” at the start, and it is manifest in the very way in which they are alive. Those genetic, constitutional givens which are the substance of the possible self, however, are only the start of the life story and are not, nor can they be, its defining character. Even with a benevolent environment, neurological development and learning will operate on it in a variety of ways, not all necessarily pathogenic, but inevitably modifying and even changing. The same set of givens may develop or be thwarted in different ways under different conditions.
The bete-noire of current controversy is the word “integration.” Ingram, of all people, should not be hostage to the ways in which “integration” as a signifier can mean many different things to different people, for its signification will skew the reasoning that follows from it. In the paper cited by Paris, he writes:
Always, our words say more than we intend. They possess a surplus of meaning that cannot be appreciated any other way than poetically. We ask about the personal idiom of words, their personal provenance, history, and function, and soon we are off in a new direction bringing into the dialogue more of our patient.
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