The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism

 The origin of drama in babies' minds, and...

The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism: https://works.hcommons.org/records/j57rp-7km14

El yo y el cerebro, con Francisco Mora

 


A partir del minuto 60. La discusión de los dos sistemas que se coordinan, el de la percepción sensorial y el de la memoria almacenada interna, que se coordina con él, pueden relacionarse con la oposición, que veíamos en G. H. Mead, entre el I activo en el mundo, y el me que es un objeto para el yo, una imagen social ante la que reaccionar.

Por otra parte, los experimentos de privación sensorial consciente, que llevan a la fabulación, son los que sin duda experimentaban los chamanes en las profundidades de las cavernas, experimentando con la ensoñación y la fabulación a resultas de algún desarrollo cognitivo novedoso que les empujó a este desarrollo de la consciencia. De ahí la similaridad por todo el mundo entre las imágenes visionarias pintadas en las rocas y que se encuentran entre las primeras obras de arte—de arte y de experiencia visionaria.

The Day We Learned to Think

 

—oOo—

To Keep on Keeping On

 —according to G. H. Mead's Mind, Self, and Society:

"We always present ourselves to ourselves in the most favourable light possible; but since we all have the job of keeping ourselves going, it is quite necessary that if we are to keep ourselves going we should thus present ourselves to ourselves."  (307)

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The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism

 The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism: https://www.academia.edu/35827813/

La complejidad del tiempo humano en G. H. Mead

 La complejidad del tiempo humano en George Herbert Mead https://www.academia.edu/29707186/

Interaccionismo Simbólico

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Teoría interaccionalista del significado

George H. Mead and the Social Self

El yo relacional

La complejidad del tiempo humano en G. H. Mead

 

'Inner Dramatization': The Theatre of Interiority in George Herbert Mead

 El Gran Teatro del Mundo (3.07.2016)

 

'INNER DRAMATIZATION': THE THEATRE OF INTERIORITY IN GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

 

 

Erving Goffman's dramatistic theory of the self, in which self-experience is constituted through the interiorization of social roles and relationships, is anticipated in George Herbert Mead's book Mind, Self, and Society.  Mead begins by defining the human gesture as a symbol—criticizing the Darwinian theories which emphasized a continuum between humans and animals in the expression of emotions between humans and animals:

  It is quite impossible to assume that animals do undertake to express their emotions. They certainly do not undertake to express them for the benefit of other animals. The most that can be said is that the 'expressions' did set free a certain emotion in the individual, an escape valve, so to speak, an emotional attitude which the animal needed, in some sense, to get rid of. They certainly could not exist in these lower animals as means of expressing emotions; we cannot approach them from the point of view of expressing a content in the mind of the individual. We can, of course, see how, for the actor, they may become definitely a language. An actor, for example, may undertake to express his rage, and he may do it by an expression of the countenance, and so convey to the audience the emotion he intended. However, he is not expressing his own emotion but simply conveying to the audience the evidence of anger, and if he is successful he may do it more effectively, as far as the audience is concerned, than a person who is really angered. There we have these gestures serving the purpose of expression of the emotions, but we cannot conceive that they arose as such a language in order to express emotion. Language, then, has to be studied from the point of view of the gestural type of conduct within which it existed without being as such a definite language. And we have to see how the communicative function could have arisen out of that prior sort of conduct. (Mind, Self, and Society 16-17).

 

Here is an account of the origin of a self and a complex interiority on the basis of the internalization of social interaction (MSS, 172-73)—this is a later and evolved phase of a more general phenomenon, which begins with more simple organisms relating to their environment; only here the environment includes the self and its social world. Thus, Mead provides a materialist and interactionalist account of the origin of consciousness and the self which is also dramatistic, i.e. reliant on the objectivization and symbolization of roles:

 

"Through self-consciousness the individual organism enters in some sense into its own environmental field; its own body becomes a part of the set of environmental stimuli to which it responds or reacts. Apart from the context of the social process at its highest levels—those at which it involves conscious communication, conscious conversations of gestures, among the individual organisms interacting with it—the individual organism does not set itself as a whole over against its environment; it does not as a whole become an object to itself (and hence is not self-conscious); it is not as a whole a stimulus to which it reacts. On the contrary, it responds only to parts or separate aspects of itself, and regards them, not as parts or aspects of itself at all, but simply as parts or aspects of the environment in general. Only within the social process at its higher levels,and also in the merely physiological environment or situation which is logically antecedent to and presupposed by the social process of experience and behavior, it does not become an object to itself. In such experience or behavior as may be called self-conscious, we act and react particularly with reference to ourselves, though also with reference to other individuals; and to be self-conscious is essentially to become an object to one's self in virtue of one's social relations to other individuals.

       Emphasis should be laid on the central position of thinking when considering the nature of the self. Self-consciousness, rather than affective experience with its motor accompaniments, provides the core and primary structure of the self, which is thus essentially a cognitive rather than an emotional phenomenon. The thinking or intellectual process—the internalization and inner dramatization, by the individual, of the external conversation of significant gestures which constitutes his chief mode of interaction with other individuals belonging to the same society—is the earliest experiential phase in the genesis and development of the self. Cooley and James, it is true, endeavor to find the basis of the self in reflexive affective experiences, i.e., experiences involving 'self-feeling'; but the theory that the nature of the self is to be found in such experiences does not account for the origin of the self, or of the self-feeling which is supposed to characterize such experiences. The individual need not take the attitudes of others toward himself in these experiences, since these experiences merely in themselves do not necessitate his doing so, and unless he does so, he cannot develop a self; and he will not do so in these experiences unless his sellf has already originated otherwise, namely, in the way we have been describing. The essence of the self, as we have said, is cognitive; it lies in the internalized conversation of gestures which constitutes thinking, or in terms of which though or reflection proceeds. And hence the origin and foundations of the self, like those of thinking, are social."

 

 

(From ch. 23: "Social attitudes and the physical world"):

 

"The self is not so much a substance as a process in which the conversation of gestures has been internalized within an organic form. This process does not exist for itself, but is simply a phase of the whole social organization of which the individual is a part. The organization of the social act has been imported into the organism and becomes then the mind of the individual. It still includes the attitudes of others, but now highly organized, so that they become what we call social attitudes rather than rôles of separate individuals. This process of relating one's own organism to the others in the interactions that are going on, in so far as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with the conversation of the 'I' and the 'me' , constitutes the self.

      The value of this importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual lies in the superior co-ordination gained for society as a whole, and in the increased efficiency of the individual as a member of the group. It is the difference between the process which can take place in a group of rats or ants and bees, and that which can take place in a human community. The social process with its various implications is actually taken up into the experience of the individual so that that which is going on takes place more effectively, because in a certain sense it has been rehearsed in the individual. He not only plays his part better under these conditions but he also reacts back on the organization of which he is a part." (178-79)

 

 ______________

 

George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. Charles W. Morris.  Chicago: U of Chicago P,  1934. 1967.

 

 

—oOo—

The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism

THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN MIND IN INFANT DRAMATISM

 

—And the origin of drama in the infant human mind.

 

 

I want to quote a crucial passage from George Herbert Mead's 'Mind, Self, and Society', developing G. H. Mead's central concept of self-interaction resulting from internalized interaction, as a generative process which gives rise to the complexity of the human mind —a mind which is inherently social, as its very structure is the result of an inner dramatization of sociality. The passage is equally important as a contribution to an interactional theory of the origin of language. I dealt with some aspects of Mead's theory of the self as it bears on the self and language in previous papers, for instance here:

 

_____. "Una pequeña teoría sobre el origen y desarrollo del lenguaje." In García Landa, Vanity Fea March 2015.*

http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/.../una-pequena-teoria...

2015

_____. "Bucles en la mente: Autointeracción, retroalimentación cerebral, y la realidad como expectativa autocumplida." Social Science Research Network 10 May 2015.*

http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2604277

2015

 

—but now I want to emphasize another dimension in Mead's conception: it is a theory of the origin of role-playing, and therefore, in an indirect way, a theory which stresses the inherent theatricality of human interaction and of the human mind. Where we find the origin of language, and the origin of the human self, there we find, as well, the origin of drama. Protodrama is inscribed in the very structure of the human mind, and in our earliest social interactions, those that take place between the newborn child and its parents.

 

Protodrama is to be found in play, and the complex role-play of the child goes beyond the playful or make-believe attitudes of young animals. This complexity is no doubt associated to the greater flexibility of the human brain (due to the human altricity and to the infant maturation in the 'social brain'—processes which feed back on each other). Human cognitive complexity, and cogntive flexibility, are inherently linked to the inner dramatism of the self, to the role-playing capacity of the human mind, and to the theatricality of human social structure. Theatre and role-playing build up our mind right from the origin of the species and of the individual.

 

From George Herbert Mead's 'Mind, Self, and Society' (Supplementary Essay III, 'The Self and the Process of Reflection'), pp. 364-66.

 

"There are two interesting human types of conduct that seemingly arise out of this relationship of child and parent. On the one hand we find what has been called the imitation of the child, and on the other the sympathetic response of the parent. The basis of each of these types of conduct is to be found in the individual stimulating himself to respond in the same fashion as that in which the other responds to him. As we have seen, this is possible if two conditions are fulfilled. The individual must be affected by the stimulus which affects the other, and affected through the same channel. This is the case with the vocal gesture. The sound which is uttered strikes on the ear of the individual uttering it in the same physiological fashion as that in which it strikes on the ear of the person addressed. The other condition is that there should be an impulse seeking expression in the individual who utters the sound, which is functionally of the same sort as that to which the stimulus answers in the other individual who hears the sound. The illustration most familiar to us is that of a child crying and then uttering the soothing sound which belongs to the parental attitude of protection. This childish type of conduct runs out later into the countless forms of play in which the child assumes the rôles of the adults about him. The very universal habit of playing with dolls indicates how ready for expression, in the child, is the parental attitude, or perhaps one should say, certain of the parental attitudes. The long period of dependence of the human infant during which his interest centers in his relations to those who care for him gives a remarkable opportunity for the play back and forth of this sort of taking of the rôles of others. Where the young animal of lower forms very quickly finds itself resonding directly to the appropriate stimuli for the conduct of the adult of its species, with instinctive activities that are early matured, the child for a considerable period directs his attention toward the social environment provided by the primitive family, seeking support and nourishment and warmth and protection through his gestures—especially his vocal gestures. These gestures inevitably must call out in himself the parental response which is so markedly ready for expression very early in the child's nature, and this response will include the parent's corresponding vocal gesture. The child will stimulate himself to make the sounds which he stimulates the parent to make. In so far as the social situation within which the child reacts is determined by his social environment, that environment will determine what sounds he makes and therefore what responses he stimulates both in others and himself. The life about him will indirectly determine what parental responses he produces in his conduct, but the direct stimulation to adult response will be inevitably found in his own childish appeal. To the adult stimulation he responds as a child. There is nothing in these stimulations to call out an adult response. But in so far as he gives attention to his own childish appeals it will be the adult response that will appear—but will appear only in case that some phases of these adult impulses are ready in him for expression. It is, of course, the incompleteness and relative immaturity of these adult responses that gives to the child's conduct one of the peculiar characters which attach to play. The other is that the child can stimulate himself to this activity. In the play of young children, even when they play together, there is abundant evidence of the child's taking different rôles in the process; and a solitary child will keep up the process of stimulating himself by his vocal gestures to act in different rôles almost indefinitely. The play of the young animal of other species lacks this self-stimulating character and exhibits far more maturity of instinctive response than is found in the early play of children. It is evident that out of just such conduct as this, out of addressing one's self and responding with the appropriate response of another, 'self-consciousness' arises. The child during this period of infany creates a forum within which he assumes various rôles, and the child's self is gradually integrated out of these socially different attitudes, always retaining the capacity of addressing itself and responding to that address with a reaction that belongs in a certain sense to another. He comes into the adult period with the mechanism of a mind."

 

 

 

 

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 11 July 2016.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2016/07/the-origin-of-human-mind-in-infant.html

         2016

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 11 July 2016.*

         http://www.ibercampus.eu/the-origin-of-the-human-mind-in-infant-dramatism-4010.htm

         2016 DISCONTINUED 2021 -  Online at the Internet Archive:

         http://www.ibercampus.eu/the-origin-of-the-human-mind-in-infant-dramatism-4010.htm

         2022

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." Social Science Research Network 7 Dec. 2017.*

         https://ssrn.com/abstract=3081625

         2017

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." In García Landa, Vanity Fea  14 Jan. 2018.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/the-origin-of-human-mind-in-infant.html

         2018

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." Academia 3 Feb. 2018.*

         https://www.academia.edu/35827813/

         2018

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." ResearchGate 4 Feb. 2018.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322924875

         2018

_____. "The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism." This Huge Stage 15 July 2022.*

         https://thishugestage.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-origin-of-human-mind-in-infant.html

         2022

CONSCIOUSNESS AS RATIONALITY AS INTERNALIZED DRAMATISM

 CONSCIOUSNESS AS RATIONALITY AS INTERNALIZED DRAMATISM

From George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society (§42, 'Summary and Conclusion'), pp. 334-36.

In the closing sections of his book, Mead summarizes his view of human consciousness as disctinct from the wider "ecological" conception of consciousness. A general ecological-interactional approach to consciousness gives us a generalized and emergent conception on consciousness (also espoused by Mead), according to which an organism reacts in a more or less complex way to its environment, and in so reacting creates novel and emergent aspects of the world. Consciousness, then, is not contained "in" the mind, but is inherently relational, a function of the organism's relation to its environment. But (within this general framework) there is a specific mode of consciousness which requires human selves and rationality, and involves the peculiarly human structure of internalized social dramatism, involving taking the role of the other, or putting oneself imaginatively in the other's stance. Which in turn gives rise to a generalized social consciousness, in which we take the attitude of a "generalized other". Such rationality involves a distribution of social parts, and a generalized understanding of what these parts are, and of the choreography and collective stage management of the whole social play, under the virtual direction of the "generalized other." These are the last paragraphs of Mead's section on "Society", before the Supplementary Essays:

"The other conception that I have brought out concerns the particular sort of intelligence that we acscribe to the human animal, so-called 'rational intelligence', or consciousness in another sense of the term. If consciousness is a substance, it can be said that this consciousness is rational perse; and jut by definition the problem of the appearance of what we call rationality is avoided. What I have attempted to do is to bring rationality back to a certain type of conduct, the type of conduct in which the individual puts himself in the attitude of the whole group to which he belongs. This implies that the whole group is involved in some organized activity and that in this organized activity the action of one calls for the action of all the others. What we term 'reason' arises when one of the organisms take into its own response the attitude of the other organisms involved. It is possible for the organism so to assume the attitudes of the group that are involved in its own act within this whole co-operative process. When it does so, it is what we term 'a rational being'. If its conduct has such universality, it has also necessity, that is, the sort of necessity involved in the whole act—if one acts in one way the others must act in another way. Now, if the individual can take the attitude of the others and control his action by these attitudes, and control their action through his own, then we have what we can term "rationality." Rationality is as large as the group which is involved; and that group could be, of course, functionally, potentially, as large as you like. It may include all beings speaking the same language.

Language as such is simply a process by means of which the individual who is engaged in co-operative activity can get the attitude of others involved in the same activity. Through gestures, that is, through the part of his act which calls out the response of others, he can arouse in himself the attitude of the others. Language as a set of significant symbols is simply the set of gestures which the organism employs in calling out the response of others. Those gestures primarily are nothing but parts of the act which do naturally stimulate others engaged in the co-operative process to carry out their parts. Rationality then can be stated in terms of such behavior if we recognize that the gesture can affect the individual as it affects others so as to call out the response which belongs to the other. Mind or reason presupposes social organization and co-operative activity in this social organization. Thinking is simply the reasoning of the individual, the carrying-on of a conversation between what I have termed the 'I' and the 'me'.

In taking the attitude of the group, one has stimulated himself to respond in a certain fashion. His response, the 'I', is the way in which he acts. If he acts in that way he is, so to speak, putting something up to the group, and changing the group. His gesture calls out then a gesture which will be slightly different. The self thus arises in the development of the behavior of the social form that is capable of taking the attitude of others involved in the same co-operative actvity. The pre-condition of such behavior is the development of the nervous system which enables the individual to take the attitude of the others. He could not, of course, take the indefinite number of attitudes of others, even if all the nerve paths were present, if there were not an organized social activity groing on such that the action of one may reproduce the action of an indefinite number of others doing the same thing. Given, however, such an organized activity, one can take the attitude of anyone in the group.

Such are the two conceptions of consciousness that I wanted to bring out, since they seem to me to make possible a development of behaviorism beyond the limits to which it has been carried, and to make it a very suitable approach to the objects of social psychology. With those key concepts one does not have to come back to certain conscious fields lodged inside the individual; one is dealing throughout with the relation of the conduct of the individual to the environment." (334-36)

Thus far Mead. I would only want to add that this description of universal and complete communicability, or of the universal exchangeability of positions, is the description of an ideal model. Actual social behavior, and the concomitant phenomena of consciousness, are just as much dependent on partial, approximative or plainly mistaken moves in the internalized dramatism, as they are on the partial success of an ideally frictionless social conduct.

 

These reflections by Mead on the 'Generalized Other' can be profitably compared with Adam Smith's notion of the 'Impartial Spectator' in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this paper I examine the implications of Smith's concept for an evolutionary of mind—the kind of theory that Mead would fully develop.

"Selección natural del Espectador Imaginario." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15 March 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/03/seleccion-natural-del-espectador.html

         2022

 

On the evolution of God and sociality, see also:

 

Johnson, Dominic. God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. New York: Oxford UP, 2015.

 

Legare, Christine (Associate Professor of Psychology; U of Texas, Austin). Rev. of God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human, by Dominic Johnson. Reading Religion 21 May 2016.*

         http://readingreligion.org/books/god-watching-you

         2016

Frames, Roles, and Institutions

How role-playing organizes both the individual and society from the inside. Institutions are exteriorizations of our psychological functions, and in turn our social mind is made up of the interiorization of institutions and the relevant roles associated to them. From George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society (§34, "The Community and the Institution" 260-61):

 

"There are what I have termed 'generalized social attitudes' which make an organized self possible. In the community there are certain ways of acting under situations which are essentially identical, and these ways of actin on the part of anyone are those which we excite in others when we take certain steps. If we assert our rights, we are calling for a definite response just because they are rights that are universal—a reesponse which everyone whould, and perhaps will, give. Now that response is present in our own nature; in some degree we are ready to take that same attitude toward somebody else if he makes tha appeal. When we call out that response in others, we can take the attitude of the other and then adjust our own conduct to it. There are, then, whole series of such common responses in the community in which we live, and such responses are what we term 'institutions'. The institution represents a common response on the part of all members of the community to a particular situation. This common response is one which, of course, varies with the character of the individual. In the case of theft the response of the sheriff is different from that of the attorney-general, from that of the judge and the jurors, and so forth; and yet they all are responses which maintain property, which involve the recognition of the property right in others. And these variations, as illustrated in the different officials, have an organization which gives unity to the variety of the responses. One appeals to the policeman for assistance, one expects the state's attorney to act, expects the court and its various funcionaries to carry out the process of the trial of the criminal. One does take the attitude of all of these different officials as involved in the very maintenance of property; all of them as an organized process are in some sense found in our own natures. When we arouse such attitudes, we are taking the attitude of what I have termed a 'generalized other'. Such organized sets of response are related to each other; if one calls out one such set of responses, he is implicitly calling out others as well.

Thus the institutions of society are organized forms of group or social activity—forms so organized that the individual members of society can act adequately and socially by taking the attitudes of others toward these activities."

Externalized Complications

La organización social como externalización y teatralización de las funciones cerebrales, reproductivas y familiares —según la descripción de George Herbert Mead, en Mind, Self, and Society (241-42):

The human being is social in a distinguishing fashion. Physiologically he is social in relatively few responses. There are, of course, fundamental processes of propagation and of the care of the young which have been recognized as a part of the social development of human intelligence. Not only is there a physiological period of infancy, but it is so lengthened that it represents about one-third of the individual's expectation of life. Corresponding to that period, the parental relation to the individual has been increased far beyond the family; the development of schools, and of institutions, such as those involved in the church and the government, is an extension of the parental relation. That is an external illustration of the indefinite complication of simple physiological processes. We take care of an infant form and look at it from the standpoint of the mother; we see the care that is given to the mother before the birth of the child, the consideration that is given for providing proper food; we see the way in which the school is carried on so that the beginning of the education of the child starts with the first year of its life in the formation of habits which are of primary importance to it; we take into account education in the form of recreation, which comes one way or another into public control; in all these ways we can see what an elaboration there is of the immediate care which parents give to children under the most primitive conditions, and yet it is nothing but a continued complication of sets of processes which belong to the original care of the child.

This, I say, is an external picture of the sort of development that takes place in a central nervous system. There are groups of relatively simple reactions which can be made indefinitely complex by uniting them with each other in all sorts of orders, and by breaking up a complex reaction, reconstructing it in a different fashion, and uniting it with other processes. Consider the playing of musical instruments. There is an immediate tendency to rhythmic processes, to use the rhythm of the body and to emphasize certain sounds, movements which can be found among the gorillas. Then comes the possibility of picking to pieces the action of the whole body, the construction of elaborate dances, the relation of the dance to sound which appears in song, phenomena which get their expression in the great Greek dramas. These results are then externalized in musical instruments, which are in a way replicas of various organs of the body. All these external complications are nothing but an externalization in society of the sort of complication that exists in the higher levels of the central nervous system. We take the primitive reactions, analyze them, and reconstruct them under different conditions. That kind of reconstruction takes place through the development of the sort of intelligence which is identified with the appearance of the self. The insittutions of society, such as libraries, systems of transportation, the complex interrelationship of individuals in political organizations, are nothing but ways of throwing on the social screen, so to speak, in enlarged fashion the complexities existing inside the central nervous system, and they must, of course, express functionally the operation of this system.

 

Inner Dramatization

How New Objects Are Created

One as One's Own Spectator

The Dramatistic Nature of the Self

Mead sobre el gesto como símbolo

La Cosa Física

 

G. H. Mead - La génesis del yo y el control social