Today we are diving into research by Anna Ciaunica and Aikaterini Fotopoulou in this book chapter entitled The Touched Self: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on Proximal Intersubjectivity and the Self. In an earlier Headless Deep Dive (Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person) we heard from Jay Garfield and Vasudevi Reddy about how child / caregiver interactions contribute to the sense of being a separate self. Simalarly, Ciaunica and Fotopoulou describe how the sense of touch and interoception contribute to building the notion of being a separate self. From birth, and even before birth, the sense of touch is flooding us with incoming information about the world. Along with touch, we have interoception - the awareness of our internal states like hunger, discomfort, etc. These senses, along with predictive processing of our brains contribute to our sense of self from the earliest stages of life. Let's break that down a bit further: The Shift from Undifferentiated Sensation to Self-Other Distinction * Before: Initially, it's theorized that the infant likely experiences a more undifferentiated flow of sensations. There's no clear separation between internal bodily states and external sensations such as sights, sounds, and smells. Everything is just "out there," without a defined sense of "me" experiencing them. There's a feeling of "arousal" or "seeking" but not a "mine" that experiences them. * Through Interactions: The key shift comes from the consistent and patterned interactions with caregivers. The caregiver's actions act as a consistent external factor that influences internal interoceptive states. This allows the infant to start to notice correlations and relationships. * Establishing the Boundary: * The infant begins to perceive, for example, that the feeling of fullness arises in correlation with the caregiver feeding them, or that a feeling of comfort is correlated with being held. This creates a pattern: actions from another body (the caregiver) consistently correlate with changes within their body. * Importantly, the infant learns that when their bodies initiate actions (e.g., crying), it does not automatically and consistently regulate their internal states. Rather, their interoceptive states are much more likely to be regulated through the actions of another person. * The difference between these "within" and "on" sensations, combined with the difference between actions that are controlled internally, and actions that come externally, starts to create a basic understanding of the boundary between "me" and "not me". My big takeaway from this is that the “self”, the “me”, the “I” is perhaps not some entity that was always there or somehow got attached to the body, rather it is the embodied experience itself which forms the mental construct of a “self” as we learn to model our own agency and learn how to navigate this world. Also, and this is key, we don’t do this on our own. It is through the care and touch of others that we come to be ourselves. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com
