The Touched Self: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on Proximal Intersubjectivity and the Self

Abstract

Is minimal selfhood a build-in feature of our experiential life (Gallagher 2005; Zahavi 2005, 2014; Legrand 2006) or a later socio-culturally determined acquisition, emerging in the process of social exchanges and mutual interactions (Fonagy et al. 2004; Prinz 2012; Schmid 2014)? This chapter, building mainly on empirical research on affective touch and interoception, argues in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that surpasses such debates, and their tacitly “detached,” visuo-spatial models of selfhood and otherness. Instead, the relational origins of the self are traced on fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, such as the amodal properties that govern the organization of sensorimotor signals into distinct perceptual experiences. Interactive experiences with effects on “within” and “on” the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., skin-to-skin touch) are necessary for such organization in early infancy when the motor system is not as yet developed. Therefore, an experiencing subject is not primarily understood as facing another subject “there.” Instead, the minimal self is by necessity co-constituted by other bodies in physical contact and proximal interaction.

Mentalizing homeostasis: The social origins of interoceptive inference

“…Our position is clearly in line with the above second-person and interaction theories (see also Ciaunica & Fotopoulou, 2016). Nevertheless, as we explain in detail below, we put forward an alternative second-person proposal that places emphasis on the fact that one of the main purposes of early social interactions is the regulation of the infant's homeostasis.…”

“…Rather, for our limited purposes we note that, despite disagreements on crucial questions about the existence and nature of the self, several contemporary accounts share the assumption that selfhood is not a subjective reflection on some other mysterious substance, or structure called the "self" (see also Ciaunica & Fotopoulou, 2016). Instead, both classic phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and more recent scholars working within the embodied/enactive cognition paradigm (Varela et al 1991;Gallagher 2000;Zahavi 2005), insist on the idea that the foundations of our self-awareness are bodily.…”

“…Hence, under the assumption that the mind was developed to serve the survival needs of the body, it is plausible to assume that one of the key features of the mind, namely its affective, experiential core, was developed to serve the survival needs of infants' bodies in relation to the very people that can ensure such survival in ontogenesis. Against this theoretical background, we aim to argue in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that traces the relational origins of the self on fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, which necessarily includes social, embodied interactions and practices in early development and beyond (see also Ciaunica & Fotopoulou, 2016).…”

For-Me-Ness, For-Us-Ness, and the We-Relationship

“…The proposal that there is a very tight link between subjectivity and sociality is certainly not new in the philosophical and psychological literature, but a novel feature of some of the recent criticisms to the received understanding of for-me-ness is that they don't appeal to language, narratives, social roles or cultural context, but rather to developmental psychology (Ciaunica and Fotopoulou 2017;Ciaunica 2016;Fotopoulou and Tsakiris 2017;Kyselo 2016;de Haan 2010) and psychopathology (Ratcliffe 2017).…”

“…One could say, along these lines, that a focus on interoception, affective touch (Ciaunica and Fotopoulou 2017;Ciaunica 2016), and prereflective forms of sociality (de Haan 2010) in early social relations, indicates that we need to better understand how the subjective character of conscious experience allows for a sense of social connectedness that is experientially manifest in cognitively undemanding ways.…”