The self in early childhood: A theoretical reappraisal

Abstract

The proliferation of empirical work relating to the first three years of childhood makes the psychological study of infancy very complex. Scientists have restricted the areas of these studies in order to postulate about specific aspects of the behavioural development of the child. This differentiation is valuable in its detailed contribution to scientific inquiry. Its complexity brings with it, however, a need for a superordinate self-theory within which to subsume the parts of the whole personality, to relate them in an organized and hierarchical way and to keep open an observation of the self's furthest developmental parameters as a paradigm for individual psychology. The self construct, at the top of the hierarchical set of individual theoretical constructs, is the study undertaken here with particular attention to the self's special relation with the ego-processes in the first years of childhood. The long human evolution of individuation has built up the genome, or programme for life, through links between the brain and germ plasm. As each individual organism is unique genetically and experientially, (containing the long evolution of the central nervous system), the organism uses its own germ plasm, linked to its own brain, in a unified or self-conscious and self-reflective way. The central nervous system relates the human being to biologically relevant aspects of the environment. It also devolves some tasks to a hierarchically lower unconscious integration.A continuity within self-experience is strengthened by dispositions within the memory system to recall behaviour through an ego-related storage system (Chapter VII). But dispositions to behave unconsciously are also present and contain inbuilt tendencies of an archetypal nature (Chapter I). Inborn reactions are now being widely studied, e.g. the newborn baby's expectation of being fed. This expectant knowledge is a priori, i.e. prior to all observational experience and thus both psychologically and genetically a priori. The need to explain such phenomena has led to new hypotheses regarding the self and its ego-system in the first year of life.The ego process has needed reassessment in its relation to the self construct. In general, the ego has been described in too simplistic a way and in widely differing ways. The ego-process proposed here is an original revision and conjunction of elements within Jung's and Freud's formulations, using Fordham's extension of Jung's selftheory and then extending these postulates of ego development still further into a new ego-process theory. An original term, 'con-integrate', is introduced. Con-inte-grates are a group of de-integrated ego aggregates which re-integrate in special systems of great significance within the ego processes. It will be argued that a self theory is consistent with general experimental data (Chapters III, IV, VI and VII); that it is heuristically essential in analytical psychology (Chapter I), in the neo-Freudian contribution of Kohut (Chapter II) and to the theory of autism (Chapter III).In general, self theories are supported by physiological analogues of the self (Chapter IV) and centrally important to neo-Kantian humanism, Mischel's cognitive models and to several dynamic construct models (Chapter V). Rychlak (1976) has defined self as "... a construct enabling the theorist to conceptualize the contribution made to behaviour by an organism which brings meaningful premises to bear from a protopoint (a premise taken as a beginning or fixed point by the self)". The term 'self' can be said to capture the impact of precedent meanings that partially determine ongoing behaviour (Chapter V). Self-premises can be varied or changing as the organism 'comes at' any one life situation. The multiplicity of premises possible to the self within a unit of time is an area psychology has yet to study thoroughly. Unconfirmed self-premises are repressed and return through dreams and in complexes where there is poor self-definition not under the individual's full self-control. The psychological uncomfortableness of a multiplicity of self-premises simultaneously present in the conscious and the unconscious gives cognitive, phenomenological, behaviourist and depth psychologists much to think about and to clarify theoretically. This study is an attempt to rectify this situation through a broadly based theoretical reappraisal of self theory and its implications for ego processes. A new theory of the ego is introduced.