Chapter 4. The Sense of a Core Self: I. Self versus Other

At the age of two to three months, infants begin to give the impression of being quite different persons. When engaged in social interaction, they appear to be more wholly integrated. It is as if their actions, plans, affects, perceptions, and cognitions can now all be brought into play and focused, for a while, on an interpersonal situation. They are not simply more social, or more regulated, or more attentive, or smarter. They seem to approach interpersonal relatedness with an organizing perspective that makes it feel as if there is now an integrated sense of themselves as distinct and coherent bodies, with control over their own actions, ownership of their own affectivity, a sense of continuity, and a sense of other people as distinct and separate interactants. And the world now begins to treat them as if they are complete persons and do possess an integrated sense of themselves.

In spite of this very distinctive impression, the prevailing views of clinical developmental theory do not reflect the image of an infant with an integrated sense of self. Instead, it is widely held that infants go through an extended period of self/other undifferentiation and that only very slowly, sometime towards the end of the first year of life, do they differentiate a sense of self and other. Some psychoanalytic