In R. Harré, Ed (1976) LIFE SENTENCES. New York: Wiley, pp.3-9.

Chapter 1

On First Gaining the Idea of Oneself as a Person

John Shotter and Susan Gregory

Infants: Organisms or Persons?

No doubt, as an organism, an infant is an extremely sensitive differential reactor to his circumstances. Thus with ingenuity and care (and perhaps with the help of the appropriate laboratory apparatus and recording techniques) one could presumably detect and identify the characteristics of his differential responding to many different situations. Imagine him wired up perhaps with electrodes and so on, being used as a sensitive measuring instrument, like canaries were used to detect escapes of gas in mines. Now, no matter how clear, distinct and characteristic the results of such investigations may be in such a situation, the characteristics would be ones which you as an outside observer had detected and identified in his differential responding: nothing in one’s results would indicate that the infant himself had detected and distinguished his own differential responding in the same way; and even less would they indicate that he knew its significance, i.e. what it implied for how he himself might deal with the situation (in contrast to merely reacting to it).

              No doubt, too, an infant is born as an intrinsically active being, manifesting an indefinite range of characteristic bodily activities apparently uncaused by external stimuli. But is it sufficient merely to observe that such intrinsic movements do in fact occur to say that it is the infant himself who moves so? At first, it seems almost as if ‘he’ is a spectator at his own motions. And only later does he himself seem to discover how to control, say, his own finger movements, thus transforming himself from a mere observer to being an agent in his own motions. As in his differential responding, so in his intrinsic activity, it is not sufficient just to observe and characterize his motions to be able to say that he himself has any knowledge of what he is doing. Something more is involved in people acting in the knowledge of who and what they are and what they are trying to do in relation to the others with whom they share their lives than [end p.3] merely behaving in a situation in a way which others can recognize – one must be able to recognize it in the same way oneself .

SELF-conscious Activity

It is thus one thing for an infant’s activity to be thought of as the mere momentary resultant of an interacting system of interdependent parts, and quite another for it to be considered as something for which he himselfis responsible. While he may be considered by outside observers to be an organism, acting as he must according to his own idiosyncratic bodily states, he must also be considered as a person . For on some occasions at least, evidently, he can act, not as his immediate bodily states demand, but on the contrary, in relation to needs and interests which must be characterized in other people’s terms, not just his own. To become a socially responsible agent, the child must learn not just to control his own behaviour and to control it intelligently, in relation to his own needs, but to control it intelligibly and responsibly. He must learn to control it in a way which niakes sense to others and relates in some way (either positively or negatively) with what, overall, others are trying to do in their lives. To do this the child must acquire some knowledge of himself: that is, more than a simple sense of his own functioning, the child must learn who and what he is in relation to all those with whom he shares his life, knowledge which may serve to order and structure his functioning in those situations he shares with others. Without such knowledge his functioning could only remain of a vague and indeterminate kind, not necessarily related to other people’s activities at all; it could only be indirectly intelligible.

              People, then, must be treated, not like organisms dealing directly with nature, but as rather special organic forms which deal with nature from known ‘positions’ within a culture, in terms of a knowledge of the part their action plays in relation to the part played by other people’s actions in maintaining or progressing the culture. They must show in their action not just consciousness or awareness of their physical circumstances, but self-consciousness, or an awareness of their relations to others. Such a quality of their consciousness is not, of course, something which can be directly observed-and mothers do not, as we shall see, work in terms of what they can directly observe in what their children do. In terms only of observational criteria, people do not differ from organisms and the rest of what there is in nature. But indirectly, people demonstrate that they act in the knowledge of who and what they are and what they are trying to do by the way in which they respond to the consequences of their own actions. It is in terms of what it implies for future action (and reaction) that the knowledge informing people’s actions is revealed; often, for instance, in the surprise they manifest when the result is not the one they expected. Thus in our attempts to make sense of people’s actions, we must be prepared to theorize about the concepts that people might hold, and to test our ‘theories’, not as we would test the logical deductions from a natural scientific [end p.4] theory, but by seeing whether the implications of holding a certain concept

are realized in a person’s behaviour. Our problem, then, is not just to describe as external observers the characteristic patterns in children ‘s activities and their changes in the course of development, but to understand how the child comes to act as an agency in his own processes of reception and production. But more than that even, we want to understand how he becomes a fully socially responsible member of our culture; how he comes to be an individual personality, but nonetheless ‘one of us’.

              The answer, we believe, can be found in the sort of social exchanges which go on between mothers and children which in the past we have thought of as being simply amusing play, but which we may now see as instructive social exchanges (Newson and Shotter, 1974; Shotter, 1973; Shotter, 1974a). Mothers, we feel, ‘instruct’ their children in the course of their play with them in the possible meanings and uses to which the child himself may put his own states of feeling and patterns of action. It may be possible now to throw some light on how mothers do this, and we would like to try to explain what we think happens by way of describing an incident that occurred in the course of one of our investigations.

The Incident

The incident we want to discuss occurred during a study conducted by one of us ( Gregory nee Treble, 1972). Twenty mother/child pairs were studied over a period of about 14 months at about monthly intervals. The children were aged on average about 8 months at the start of the study. The mothers brought their children in once a month to the Child Development Research Unit here in Nottingham, and a short 5-10 minute videotape recording was made of them trying to ‘help their infant to do a form-board’ – the only instruction the mothers were in fact given. The form-board in question was just a circular piece of wood, about 12 in across, with six shapes either cut into it or raised up upon it. ‘Doing’ the board consisted in either placing the cut-out shapes back into the board, or shaped brass frames around the raised forms.

              In the course of one of these sessions with a little girl called Samantha, aged 11 months at the time, her mother, just after she had physically helped her to fit one of the brass frames around its appropriate shape, said: ‘Oh, clever girl. .. (pause) ...AREN’T YOU CLEVER’. Now what is unusual here is not that she said ‘Oh, clever girl’ in that soothing but emphatic and pleased sort of way that mothers do, or even that she repeated it – mothers say and repeat this sort of thing all the time whenever their chidren do anything which seems to them to be a sensible contribution to the task; what is unusual is that after a short pause, she leant forward to catch the child’s eye and said the equivalent again, but this time with the sort of emphasis which suggests ‘Look here, I really am telling you that you are a clever girl’. The trouble was that Samantha had not really ‘replied’ to her mother’s exclamation as her mother required.

              On examining the videotape record of this and other similar incidents [end p.5] further, one notices that in the course of the mother’s patient attempts to get her infant to do the board, the infant may do all sorts of strange things with the pieces: chew them, bang them on the table of the board, scrub them back and forth on the board, throw them on the floor, hold the brass pieces up to the light to see them glint in the sun, and so on. When in the midst of all this the infant succeeds in placing a piece appropriately, either by her own devices or with the help of her mother, the mother ‘marks’ the event as a significant one : ‘Oh, there’s a good girl’, she says. But that is not enough. She expects a ‘reply’ of a particular kind back: she expects her infant to stop the flow of her activity, turn to look at her, and smile ; she expects, perhaps, to see her child visibly relax, to cease for a moment her concentration on the board and to sense that peculiar state of being which we may have with another person when they require us to be neither agents or patients; she wants her child to know that by her action she has succeeded in doing something which is socially significant, that her action is one which in this situation makes sense. In other words, she wants an indication from her child which implies that she appreciates the social value of her act. In the incident we mention, this did not happen. Samantha’s mother had physically helped her to put the piece on, ‘Put there. ..push it on. ..hard. ..down again ...there ...(the piece at last goes on) bang. .. Oh, clever girl !’, she had said as she helped. But Samantha had then immediately turned away to get another piece, she gave no indication of recognizing that what she had ‘done’ was of any significance, hence the repeat after an expectant pause of the ‘marker’, this time with emphasis and after having caught the child’s eye: Samantha stops and turns, looks at her mother, eye to eye, with a slight head-down, eyes-up, fingers-at-lips smile, open now to the influence of her mother’s activity again. The exchange is quite brief, but real nonetheless. Then, ‘Do it again ...off’ her mother says, directing and again physically helping her to take the piece just put on, off again. The game continues for a few more ‘off-and-on’s’ with that same piece before her mother allows Samantha to transfer her attentions to another piece.

Mothers as ‘double-agents’

The incident that we have described is an example of an instructive episode which we would like to interpret in general as follows. We would like to suggest that, although in the midst of all his (we call the infant ‘he’ to avoid confusion with pronouns) activity on the formboard the infant may be observed to place a piece appropriately, this alone is not good enough for the mother. She will not be satisfied until it seems to her that he himself did it: he must give indications in his actions that he did it as a result of trying to do it; that he knew what he was trying to do, that his action was based in some knowledge of the socially defined requirements of the situation – he must indicate that he ‘sees’ the situation as she does. This is the result the mother must aim for in her exchanges with her child.

              She achieves it, we propose, by acting in the social exchanges as a ‘double-[end p.6]agent’: she acts both on her own behalf and also on her infant’s behalf in what goes on.

              At first, an infant clearly has little power to satisfy his own needs. But to the extent that a mother can interpret her infant’s behaviour as having an ‘intention’ to it (no matter how vague and indefinite it might be on his part), she can help him to complete or fulfil it, and in the process ‘negotiate’ a satisfaction of his needs with him. The child’s action is thus made by the mother to eventuate in a consequence that is at least intelligible to her; she does it by rendering herself available to him as an ‘instrument’ or ‘mechanism’ acting to produce a result which she feels may be one ‘intended’ in his activity – whether it is the actual, precise intention in his activity, no one can say, least of all the child, for his activity is so diffuse and uninformed that any intention there may be in it at all must be presumed to be, at this stage, really indeterminate.

              The mother cannot, however, be expected to attempt to complete the ‘intention’ in every aspect of her child’s rambling activity. She has her own goals in the situation too: she wants her child to do the board, and to give her indications that he is gaining an understanding of how to do so; she wants him to act as she requires. Her intentions in the exchanges must influence the interpretations she puts on her child’s activities and the way in which she attempts to help him to ‘complete’ them. And the way in which she maintains the social link with her child in all of this is by acting in response to what he does on the form-board in such a way as to make his ‘successful’ actions instrumental in his maintaining his social contact with her – drawing on what, if there are any other innate needs in humans apart from hunger, thirst and sex, is an innate need for social contact. Given her intentions, she responds to his activity on the board as if his intention had been something to do with placing the pieces, even though clearly it could not have been – there being no way of telling him before the exchanges began that, among all the things he could do with the pieces, that is what he ought to do with them.

              As a result of her help, as a result of the way in which she completes the realization of what might possibly be his intention, his actions become incorporated into a circle of reciprocal exchanges between them both. And, to the extent that he learns to do, among all the other things that he could do with the pieces, just those things which maintain his contact with her, he comes to act in such a way that at least makes sense to her – the child not understanding till later what it is that he is actually doing, it being enough at first that he understands how to do it. And thus the process continues, with the child being ‘helped’ by his mother in this way to retrospectively evaluate his states of feeling and the consequences of his actions. Now it is not so much that in this process he learns new states of feeling or new patterns of action that have never occurred to him before, that would otherwise be biologically unavailable to him, but that he learns meanings or socially significant uses for feelings that he may have or movements that he may make any time. In acquiring knowledge of how to order his activity in relation to the requirements of others, he himself learns how to act; he learns, gradually, how not to act like a child, reliant upon others [end p.7] to complete and give meaning to his behaviour, but to relate what he does and what he feels to his own knowledge of his own momentary ‘position’ in his culture.

              We may leave Vygotsky (1966, pp. 43-4) to sum up our position thus:

’s cultural development appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first on the social plane and then on the psychological, first among people as an intermental category, and then within the child as an intramental category.”

In studying the child’s growth as a person we must distinguish the cultural from the organic, the historical from the natural, and the social from the biological. Psychology has not yet clearly established the differences (and the relations) between these different forms of order (Shotter, 1975), but, if it ever does, it must remember that if it wants to study people as people it must not take them as entities immersed directly in nature, but as immersed in a culture in nature, and that this makes them different from any other natural things that there are.

References:

Macmurray, J. (1957). The Self as Agent, London, Faber and Faber.

Macmurray, J. (1961). Persons in Relation, London, Faber and Faber. .

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Newson, J., and Shotter, J. (1974). ‘How babies communicate’, New Society, 29, No.618, 345.

Shotter, J. (1973). ‘Prolegomena to an understanding of play’ J. for the Theory Social Behaviour, 3, 47.

Shotter, J. (1974a). ‘The development of personal powers’, In M. P. M. Richards (Ed.), The Integration of a Child into the Social World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Shotter, J. (1974b). ‘What is it to be human?’, In N. Armistead (Ed.), Reconstructing Social Psychology, Harmondsworth, Penguin .

Shotter, J. (1975). Images of Man in Psychological Research, London, Methuen.

Treble, S. (1972). ‘The development of shape perception in young children’, Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Nottingham.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1966). ‘Development of the higher mental functions’, In Psychological Research in the USSR, Moscow, Progress Publishers.

Notes: