Infants' subjective world of relatedness: Moments, feeling shapes, protonarrative envelopes, and internal working models
✍ Scribed by Inge Bretherton
- Book ID
- 101341032
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1994
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 445 KB
- Volume
- 15
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0163-9641
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
I still remember, as a preschooler, the feeling of disbelief as my mother explained that the five senses were the source of all experience. How could the wholeness of reality come separately from eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin? To test out what I had been told, I closed my eyes, then put my hands over my ears, held my nose, and reluctantly concluded that my mother must be right. Since then, I have discovered that much more goes into the creation of the inner world than the intergration of input from the five senses. Shifts in motivation, affect and arousal, motor actions, sensations, and memory all take part in building the multimodal, polyphonic representational world on which Joseph Sandler and Daniel Stern reflect in their thoughtprovoking essays.
SANDLER
Sandler takes us on a whirlwind tour of the psychoanalytic inner world as it is informed by his notions about representational schemas. He considers babies as active meaning-makers whose representations derive from initially feeling-dominated subjective experiences. Indeed, as Sandler states elsewhere:
The whole development of knowledge of the "world" is created through the link between the ideomotor experiential representations and feeling states. Even the highest form of symbolic representation is only meaningful, and indeed is only created, through its direct or indirect link with feelings. In this sense there is no such thing as a purely cognitive or intellectual process. (Sandler, 1987, p. 247) Also important is Sandler's account of the distinction between representations stored in long-term memory (complex schemas or rule-systems that are "nonexperiential"; i.e., can never become conscious) and aspects of these representations as activated in short-term memory (experiential, having a specific shape): "If a child feels angry and then subject to attack, the shape of the self-representation changes" (or rather, a different aspect of the self-representation becomes activated). The particular shape taken by that experiential representation is, of course, often determined by