directly relevant to psychological self-awareness,

however,
248 Chapter 9
directly relevant to psychological self-awareness, although it will turn out
to be indirectly relevant. What I want to focus on is the social dimension
of the 9-month revolution. Here is how Colwyn Trevarthen, one of the
leading workers in the area, describes the social transition that takes
place: “The most important feature of the new behaviour at 9 months is
its systematically combining interests of the infant in the physical, privately
known reality near him, and his acts of communication addressed
to persons. A deliberately sought sharing of experiences about events and
things is achieved for the first time” (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978, 184).
What I will be proposing is that this new behavior emerging in 9-monthold
infants manifests distinguishing self-awareness relative to the three
categories at the core of the notion of a psychological subject, in other
words, that what we see at 9 months is the emergence of psychological
self-awareness in infancy. Let me start, though, by sketching the broad
contours of the transition in infant development, and in particular the
background against which it takes place.
Infants are social beings from their very earliest days (Trevarthen
1993). An important illustration of this is provided by the work on neonatal
imitation cited and briefly discussed in chapter 5. Meltzoff and
Moore (1983) found that infants with a mean age of 32 hours (including
one as young as 42 minutes) were capable of imitating gestures of mouth
opening and tongue protrusion performed by an investigator. As I
sketched in chapter 5 (see also Bermu´ dez 1996), neonatal imitation
behavior reveals that infants have a sophisticated social awareness of
physical commonalities between themselves and human adults. Infant imitation
of facial gestures presupposes a recognition on the part of the infants
that the gestures they see in front of them are gestures that they
themselves can make (although they cannot see themselves making them).
This recognition in turn must rest on an awareness of having a common
physical structure with the experimenter, and with other human beings in
general. Given that the capacity for imitation behavior seems to set in
immediately after birth, it is natural to conclude that this offers one respect
in which the human infant is born as a social being.
There is, of course, a range of further empirical evidence supporting
the thesis that the infant universe is social from the very start of life. One
body of evidence comes from the primitive discriminatory abilities that
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 249
infants display. Discrimination of voices is a good example. Infants as
young as 3-days-old seem to prefer their own mother’s voice over the voice
of another infant’s mother (DeCasper and Fifer 1980). There is also evidence
that slightly older infants (2-weeks-old) were more likely to stop
crying on hearing their mother’s voice than when they heard the sound of
a female stranger (Bremner 1988, 157). One possible explanation for this
sensitivity to the maternal voice is that it is acquired while the infant is
still in the womb. No such explanation is available, however, for some
of the striking results that have emerged with respect to young infants’
abilities for discriminating faces. Particularly interesting are the results
obtained by Field,Woodson, Greenburg, and Cohen (1982) showing that
infants with a mean age of 45 hours revealed a clear preference for the
face of their mother rather than the face of a stranger. The same study
also showed that the same infants, after being repeatedly presented with
their mother’s face, became habituated to it and would eventually look
longer at a stranger’s face.
This sensitivity on the part of young infants to perceptually discriminable
features of other individuals is matched by a sensitivity to the rather
more subtle matter of other people’s emotional states. Again, this is something
that starts more or less from birth, as is indicated by the phenomenon
often termed empathic arousal, where infants begin to cry when they
hear another infant cry (Sagi and Hoffman 1976). It is worth adverting
also to a phenomenon (noted in chapter 5) that was discovered while the
experiments revealing empathic arousal were being replicated. Neonates
are capable of discriminating their own crying from the crying of other
infants (as evidenced by the fact that their distress crying significantly
decreases when a recording of themselves crying replaces a recording of
another infant crying). As they grow older, infants’ capacities for discriminating
emotional states become more sophisticated. The 3-month-old
infants tested by Kuchuk, Vibbert, and Bornstein (1986) showed a preference
for a face with a smiling expression over a face with a neutral expression,
and this preference increased with the intensity of the smile.
These different forms of infant social sensitivity manifest themselves
in surprisingly complex forms of interaction between infants and their
caregivers. By the time they are 2-months-old, infants engage in extended
and coordinated protodialogues or protoconversations involving recipro-
250 Chapter 9
cal vocalization, with each partner taking their turn and adapting their
behavior to fit in with the other (Bateson 1975, Trevarthen 1993). An
excellent description of a typical episode of protoconversation, worth
quoting in full, has been provided by Colwyn Trevarthen:
The start of communication is marked by orienting of the baby. Babies 6 weeks
or older focus on the mother’s face and express concentrated interest by stilling of
movement and a momentary pause in breathing. The infant’s interest as a whole
conscious being is indicated by the coordination and directedness of this behaviour,
which aims all modalities to gain information about the mother’s presence
and expressions. Hands and feet move and clasp the mother’s body or her supporting
hand, the head turns to face her, eyes fix on her eyes or mouth, and ears
hold and track her voice.
The next, and crucial, phase is signaled by the infant’s making a “statement of
feeling” in the form of a movement of the body, a change in hand gesture away
from clasping the mother, a smile or a pout, a pleasure sound or a fretful cry. The
mother, if she is alert and attentive, reacts in a complementary way. A positive,
happy expression of smiling and cooing causes her to make a happy imitation,
often complementing or praising the baby in a laughing way, and then the two of
them join in a synchronised display that leads the infant to perform a more serious
utterance that has a remarkably precocious form.
This infant utterance is the behaviour, in that context of interpersonal coordination
and sharing of feelings, which justifies the term protoconversation. It looks
and sounds as though the infant, in replying to the mother, is offering a message
or statement about something it knows and wants to tell. Mothers respond and
speak to these bursts of expression as if the infant were really saying something
intelligible and propositional that merits a spoken acknowledgment. (1993,
130–132)
An experimental paradigm developed by Murray and Trevarthen (1985)
makes a persuasive case for why this sort of behavior is properly described
as a primitive form of conversation behavior, rather than simply as the
mother accommodating herself to the random vocalizations of her child.
Murray and Trevarthen used closed-circuit television to set up remote interactions
between 6-to-8-week-old infants and their mothers, with each
partner seeing a life-size full-face image of the other. Even in this artificial
medium there ensued a fairly normal protoconversation of the sort described
above (barring the bodily contact, of course). The experimenters
then broke the closed-circuit link and, after a short while, began replaying
to the infants videotapes of their mother filmed a few minutes earlier
during the real-time interaction. The infants showed real distress at this,
despite the fact that the videotapes showed precisely the same images of