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Question Two: Are there critical periods of self-development? If so, what are they? Do specific aspects of the self develop as specific periods? If self-development is a maturational process, how flexible is it? If there is a fixed timetable, what are the implications for clinical intervention? Are there important data from contemporary developmental neuroscience that may inform our theories of self? Might there be precocious self-development analogous to precocious ego development, and if so what does it look like and what are its consequences? How does gender influence sense of self? How does the body ego organize the self? And finally, how does the child's self emerge from the mother-child matrix, and is this process ever completed?
As you can see, this question had many parts, not all of which the presenters chose to address directly.
Let me identify four critical periods during which qualitatively different levels of self-organization seem to establish themselves.
During this first period, from birth to 3 months of age, what I shall refer to as the perceptual self comes into being. The infant is preoccupied with the exploration of the sensory consequences of his acting body. Evidence indicates that infants have a sophisticated innate ability to judge differing degrees of response-stimulus contingency—how the environment responds or fails to respond when the infant does something (Watson 1994). This ability (Gergely and Watson 1999) attends primarily to perfectly contingent