The origins of knowledge about the self is arguably the most fundamental problem of psychology. It is a classic theme that has preoccupied great psychologists, beginning with William James and Freud. On reading current literature, today's developmental psychologists and ethologists are clearly expressing a renewed interest in the topic. Furthermore, recent progress in the study of infant and animal behavior, provides important and genuinely new insights regarding the origins of self-knowledge.This book is a collection of current theoretical views and research on the self in early infancy, prior to self-identification and the well-documented emergence of mirror self-recognition. The focus is on the early sense of self of the young infant. Its aim is to provide an account of recent research substantiating the precursors of self-recognition and self-identification. By concentrating on early infancy, the book provides an updated look at the origins of self-knowledge.

How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awareness Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects—humans, infants, animals, and robots—in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines—psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience—came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity. The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century.

Fascinating insight into the life-span and productivity of the non-verbal, visual mind.

This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities.

When and how is the self acquired and what characterizes its development and change over the life span? What are the implications of using different methodologies to study the self with different age groups? This book addresses these and related questions. The authors offer research on early and middle childhood, late childhood and adolescence, and adulthood and old age. Among the issues considered are the relationship between cognitive complexity and self-evaluation in childhood, the pivotal socio-emotional tasks that confront the adolescent, and effects of situational and structural factors on the self-esteem of adolescents and adults, and age and gender differences in the ideal and undesired selves of young and older adults. These contributions illustrate the different theoretical and methodological issues that are associated with differing stages of the life span and provide a summary of the current knowledge base of the self across the life span. Unlike previous books on study of the self, this one provides a systematic analysis of the theoretical and methodological issues and a selection of several alternative methodologies for studying the self across the life span.

It is always enlightening to inquire about the origins of a research en deavor or a particular theoretical approach. Beginning with the observa tion of the mental life of the infant in 1962, Michael Lewis has contrib uted to the change in the view of the infant as an insensate mass of confusion to a complex and intellectual being. Anyone fortunate enough to have participated in the infancy research of the 1960s knows how exciting it was to have discovered in this small creature such a full and complex organism. More central to the origins of this work was the perception of the infant as an interactive, not a reactive, organism, and as one who influenced its social environment and constructed its cogni tive life, not one who just passively received information. Other areas of psychology had already begun to conceptualize the organism as active and interactive, even while developmental psychologists still clung to either simple learning paradigms, social reinforcement theories, or reflex ive theories. Even though Piaget had proposed an elaborate interactive theory, it was not until the late 1960s that his beliefs were fully im plemented into developmental theory and practice. A concurrent trend was the increase of concern with mother-infant interactions (Ainsworth, 1969; Bowlby, 1969; Goldberg & Lewis, 1969; Lewis & Goldberg, 1969) which provided the impetus for the study of social and emotional as well as cognitive development.