Born with a Virtual Other in Mind

STEIN BRÅTEN:

Introducing a Thesis:

"Some people,' said Humpty, looking away from her
as usual, "have no more sense than a baby!"

('THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
and what Alice found there'
by Lewis Caroll, 1872)

Current research on infancy and child development
invites a revision of our picture of the human
mind, of the roots of social understanding and
concern, and of the relation between thought,
feeling, and communication. Some classical
conceptual distinctions are found wanting. For
example, in need of complements are Darwin's
categories of emotions, Freud's attribution of a
superego as the mind's agent of morality, and
Piaget's concept of decentration required for the
child's partaking in an interpersonal lifeworld.

We have once taken part in the lifeworld of
infants, and may again, as parent or caretaker,
come to share in some of the pains and delights
involved in infancy. The study of human nature in
infancy and beyond can be a fascinating mixture
of story-telling and conversations,
video-recording and participation, and our trying
to turn the looking-glass towards ourselves in
wonder.

One's particular perspective limits the focus and
determines the levels of resolution and details
of that which is captured and constructed. When
writing about infancy one attempts in a way to
offer a looking-glass to the reader. It may
appear as an objective undertaking. It is not.
Feelings, even dreams, play a part, as they do in
the genesis of the thesis behind the explanations
offered in this book. And yet, the attempt to
explain is not a subjective undertaking. To
invite others to share a given view, even
tentatively and as a part of dialogue between
complementary views, is an intersubjective
undertaking. What the other may see through the
looking-glass, may fit with preconceived notions,
or make no sense, or perhaps sometimes turn out
like the looking-glass offered to Alice, turning
things on their head.

The view of the nature of the mind in infancy,
childhood, and adulthood submitted in the
following appears to turn things on their head.
For example, when looking at the infant and the
adult in interplay the reader is invited to see
them as one self-organizing system, not two. When
looking at the infant left to himself, the reader
is invited to see not one, but two participants

making up a self-organizing dyad. The same form
of self-organizing processes that unfolds itself
in the infant's protodialogue with an actual
other is seen to unfold itself in the infant when
by himself, in dialogue with what I term the
virtual other.

The virtual other1 can be preliminary defined as
a companion process, and associated space, in the
mind's dialoging with itself and which invites
replacement by actual others. By virtue of its
inner companion space for communion with a
virtual other, the infant is expected to invite
and feel the perspective of the actual other who
replaces the virtual other, and to be able to
continue by himself when the actual other leaves
or is left out. Examples are the baby's use of
what Winnicott calls "transitional objects", such
as a blanket piece or a bundle of wool, or, later
in life, the preschooler's "egocentric speech",
found by Vygotsky to be exhibited even by the
problem-solving school child when in trouble.
Such occurrences will be specified in the
chapters to follow as instances of the child's
dialoging with his virtual other.

When during the first months of life the parent
or careperson as actual others replace the
infant's virtual other, the self-organizing dyad
that thereby recreates itself exhibits patterns
that appear impressive or puzzling to the outside
observer. Examples are perfectly timed
turn-taking and sometimes minute inter-bodily
coordination and apparent imitation of gestures.

As a scientist or an observer one is outside
children's lifeworlds and yet attempt to make
sense of them. Perhaps understanding may
discoveries are facilitated by being in a
boundary position, able to shift between being an
inside participant in adult-infant dyads and an
observer applying the looking-glass. Mary
Catherine Bateson's finding is a case in point:

In 1970 she carries out studies in a tiny film
projection room at M.I.T. Between breastfeedings
of her own newborn daughter, she spends hours
studying and analyzing films and tapes of mothers
and their children in their first months of life.
She picks out series of brief passages in the
films and analyzes them frame by frame. She does
acoustic analyzes of the infants' and the
mothers' vocalizations. She finds that by three
months there is a kind of flowing pattern of
alternating vocalizing turns and accompanying
gestures between infants and mothers, sometimes
exhibited already within a scant month after
birth. This pattern she later terms
"protoconversation". It allows for a description
in the metaphor of a dance, and as conforming to
the turn-taking pattern of adults in
conversation. Colwyn Trevarthen and his coworkers
who have carried out extensive laboratory studies
of mother-baby interplay and protoconversations,
find that they are evidences of what he terms
'primary intersubjectivity' on the part of the
infant.

These are instances of infancy research findings
during the past decades which call for a revision
of the way in which infancy has been understood.
Infants turn out to be more sociable than
previously assumed, ready to engage in mutual
interplay and reciprocal interaction, capable of
being in affect attunement with the other, and
even showing prosocial behavior, that is, caring
for and helping the other in need or distress.

For example, as I am writing this introduction in
my summer cabin, I am interrupted by my
daughter's telling me about how her youngest
child, Katharina (26 weeks) comforted her elder
sister, Kine (4 year and 3 months). They were in
bed with their mother. Kine kept begging for her
dummy and juice bottle and then starts sobbing.
Katharina, sitting on her mother's stomach, turns
over, extends her arms towards Kine, and then
puts her face against Kine's face. This case of
Katharina (five months old) showing concern for
her sister in distress is but one of numerous
examples of the sociability, care and
understanding that infants and young children may
exhibit. The case is consistent with what has
been revealed in recent infant research, and
perhaps with what parents have known in their
heart for ages. When parents meet with their
babies, for example, it is hard for them not to
notice how the children will pay each other acute
attention. As will be exemplified later, even an
infant born three months before term, when
carried in "kangaroo"-manner by the parent, can
engage in reciprocal visual and auditory contact
with the adult.

These examples do not fit the view of the infant
as asocial, egocentric, or lacking contact
abilities. Hence, they pose a challenge to
theories of child development that traditionally
have entertained such viewpoints. Revealed
phenomena of infant "imitation" and affect
attunement, of protoconversation and prosocial
behavior challenge both individualistic and
collectivistic perspectives. They also partly
defy explanations from an information processing
perspective of mediating symbolic
representations. A complementary perspective is
proposed in this book. It will be seen to permit
the modeling of processes within and between
infants and adults in terms of the same dyadic
format: the self-organizational form of the
dialogical.

The core of the thesis that will be employed in
explanations offered of the above and other
findings and phenomena is this:

(q) The infant is born with a virtual other in
mind that invites replacement by some actual
other in felt immediacy. Hence, the immediate
form of understanding and feeling is assumed to
have the primary form of the dialogical,
irrespective of whether it recreates itself (i)
in the mind (in dialogue with the virtual other),
or (ii) between minds (in dialogue with an actual
other).

When the adult actual other takes the place of
the baby's virtual other, the self-organizing
dyad may be seen to recreate itself in the same
operational form, now realized by two organisms
instead of one. This will be seen to permit an
explanation of how a prematurely born girl baby,
long before term is able to engage in a
reciprocal duet with her father. When contact
with the caring other is aborted or perturbed,
and the baby is left to her herself she will,
before going to sleep, come to engage in a
self-organizing manner in a continued contact
with herself, that is, with her virtual other
which endows "life" to some transitional object,
such as her thumb, tongue, or a dummy.

No qualitative jump need be involved when the
baby shifts between (i) being engaged in such
contact with herself and (ii) being engaged again
in contact with the actual other. This is
indicated in Fig.0.1.

The self-organizing dyad of the baby B recreates
itself in the same form of felt immediacy when
the baby's virtual alter *A is replaced by adult
actual alter A. By virtue of feeling its own
lifeform through its virtual alter the baby will
feel the lifeform of the actual alter replacing
the baby's virtual alter. Noticing how natural
and effortlessly the baby participates in
protodialogue, Newson refers to those "mysterious
processes" which underlie the baby's capacity to
share states of feeling with the adult. In his
studies of emotions in man and the animal Darwin
suggested an instinctual emotional basis for
infant's ability to sense feelings in others.
Stern identifies what he terms vitality affects
as a complement to Darwin's categorical emotions,
and points to infants' apparent innate capacity
for cross-modal and a-modal perception of the
other's emotional expressions. As we shall see,
when offering an account of protodialogue, the
puzzling aspects of shared feelings and affect
attunement, as well as their perturbation, may be
considered in similar terms.

Based on infant studies in his laboratory at the
Edinburgh Centre for Research in Child
Development, Trevarthen was the first to come up
with experimental evidences and corroborating
statements about processes corresponding to a
virtual other in the infant's mind. In its
emotional and communicative organization there
appears to be something that expects and welcomes
the mother as the actual other. The model2
formulated in line with Fig. 0.1 (specified in
chapter 3) was found to explain
protoconversation.3C. Trevarthen (1989): Origins
and Directions for the Concept of Infant
Intersubjectivity. Newsletter for the Society for
Research in Child Development, Autumn 1989.pp.1-4.

When infant-adult communication is aborted or
perturbed, the model predicts that the infant
will resort to modes of self-organization in
dialogue with himself, that is, with his virtual
other, rather than randomized or chaotic
behavior. Confirmation in this respect has been
provided by Lynne Murray. At the Cambridge
University Winnicott Research Unit she has
recently shown how data from experimental
perturbation of mother-baby communication and
from studies of the impact of postnatal
depression are consistent with Object Relations
theory and with the model implications.4 "Until
recently, accounts of infant emotional and
cognitive development in terms of British Object
Relations theory and of developmental psychology
have been largely provided in separate
intellectual domains with little possibility of
integration.

The development of the model infant
intersubjectivity and the role of the virtual
other has provided a bridge between these two
disciplines."

This will be turned to in chapter 4. The
organization of the book reflects the way in
which the self-organizing dialogue of the mind is
seen to unfold itself in primordial modes of
immediate understanding during the first months
of life, and come to be complemented by the
cultural and constructed modes of mediate
understanding that arise from interactional
experiences.

Table 0.1 Primordial, constructed, and distorted
domains of self-and other-relations, cutting
across intra- and interpersonal levels

(i) INTRAPERSONAL (ii) INTERPERSONAL
(ego and virtual alter) (ego and actual alter)

(Do) (D1)
PRIMORDIAL the infant in the infant in
DOMAINS self-organizing self-organizing
OF dialogue with protodialogue
IMMEDIATE with its with the adult
RELATIONS virtual other actual other

(D2) (D3)
CONSTRUCTED the experienced the experienced
DOMAINS infant in self- child in
OF conversation with conversation with
MEDIATE transitional objects actual others
RELATIONS and creative media through symbolic
use later in life representations

COLLAPSED collapse of collapse of
DOMAINS intrasubjective intersubjective
THROUGH feelings feelings
DISTORTIVE (divorce from (exclusion of
RELATIONS the virtual other) actual others)

The way in which the same operational format will
be applied in the modeling of processes across
the intra- and inter-personal level has been
indicated in Fig.0.1. They are seen to involve
the self-organizing mind as it recreates itself
in dialogue (i) with the virtual other in domain
(Do), and with the actual other in domain (D1).
They are posited as primordial modes involving
intra- and intersubjective feelings.5 They may,
however, come to be converted or be brought to
periodic or more permanent collapse by extremely
distortive experiences, bringing about a divorce
from the virtual other and exclusion of actual
others from felt immediacy.

The co-constructed domains (D2) and (D3) apply
only to the experienced infant and to processes
later in life, for example, how the baby, having
resorted to transitional objects, later in life
may find a similar form in the creative use of
cultural media. This does not entail, however,
that the primordial domains (Do) and (D1) apply
exclusively to the beginning of life. Unless
permanently perturbed and converted through
previous interaction experiences, they will be
seen to remain domains for potential processes of
felt immediacy throughout life, complementing
those of mediate understanding. They pertain to
the complementary process of children taking the
perspective of the actual other. In the
primordial domain (D1) of immediate understanding
the actual other's perspective is felt by virtue
of the child's virtual other. In the
constructional domain (D3) of mediate
understanding it is taken by virtue of the
experienced child's re-presented or generalized
other. The infant's inherent ability to relate to
the actual other in what Whitehead terms
"presentational immediacy" will be seen to
provide the pre-understanding required for
acquiring through interaction the symbolic means
for understanding also in re-presentational
mediacy. For example, as we shall turn to in
chapter 8, while infants appear to grasp
immediately the other's emotion, Harris finds
that young children, when asked about it, are
unable to acknowledge expressions of mixed
feelings in themselves or in others. While the
former pertain to the domain of immediate
understanding, the latter concerns the domain of
mediate understanding in which the child becomes
capable of imagining himself in the other's shoes
through re-presentational means for simulating
the other.

Findings and phenomena in infancy and child
development that will be considered in the light
of the thesis are these:

. the ability of the infant to engage in
protoconversation, affective communion and
attunement with the parent or careperson; and
infants' apparent ability to "imitate"
expressions of affect (chapters 1 - 4);

. phenomena of transition involving the infant's
use of some "transitional object", and the
creative use of other media later in life for
conversations "with oneself", including so-called
"egocentric speech" exhibited by the preschool
child (chapters 4 - 6, and 12);

. infants' prosocial capacity to take the others
perspective and to show feelings of care and
exhibit concern for the other in need or
distress, children's mixed feelings when engaged
in hurting the other, and the complementarity
between sentiments and judgments in moral
development (chapters 7 - 9).

Part Two is devoted to the roots and collapse of
concern. Explanations will be offered, for
example of how it was that Katharina, five months
old, could be able to exhibit caring concern for
her elder sister in distress. Reports by Anna
Freud, Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow and others on
children showing care and concern for the other
in need or distress will be seen in the light of
implications of the thesis. Children not only
engage in helping and comforting each other, but
also in hurting each other, as most parents will
have observed. I shall discuss reports on
children's "mixed feelings", as studied by Judy
Dunn, Paul Harris, and others, and on how
neglected or abused toddlers may sometimes engage
in abusing others.

This brings us to the "dark" side of human
nature, the converse of the inherent capacities
entailed by thesis, or rather, the way in which
the dialogic and dyadic self-organization
attributed to the mind in term of (q) may convert
into distorted forms:

(p) Distortions may bring about a periodic or
more permanent collapse of the self-organizing
dialogue of the mind, ruling out any
complementary perspective, or even excluding the
other, virtual and actual, from felt immediacy.

In the extreme case the capacity to feel with the
other, actual or virtual, can be distorted in a
way that generates a separate self in divorce
from the virtual other.

In chapter 10 I turn to the way in which some
subjects in Milgram's electric chair experiments
appear to suffer periodic collapse during the
experiment. First, they submit to the exclusive
perspective of the experimenter, ruling out their
own in the process. Second, they exclude the
victim from felt immediacy, including instead the
experimenter in their immediate companion space.
When, however, the victim is brought into closer
immediacy, or the immediate closeness to the
experimenter is reduced, the proportion of
subjects administering shock to the limit is
drastically reduced.

This chapter will otherwise be devoted to the
shattering studies by Christie and Lifton of Nazi
war criminals. Lifton describes doctors who
discard the Hippocratic oath and commit genocide.
Such atrocities committed for the sake of the
cause can hardly be considered merely in terms of
aggression instincts, as Lorenz' points about
aggression in man and animal lend itself to be
interpreted.6 Mankind repeatedly shows through
its history how a monolithic perspective -
religious, moral or economic-political -
co-constructed in the culture and internalized in
the individual born to the culture, can mobilize
and give coherence to destruction and atrocities,
even genocide. This relates to a point made by
the brother of one of those responsible for the
Red Khmer mass murders. In his childhood and
youth this man was a kind boy, recounts the
brother, "he could not even bring himself to kill
a hen for their dinner meal." In his analysis of
totalitarian logic, Herbst (chapter 9) has shown
how a dictum, such as 'Let there be a world free
of evil!', can be lethal when embedded in an
Aristotelian structure of two-valued logic that
defines the enemy or the oppressors as evil and
beyond salvation. Submitting to a monolithic
perspective, the persons committing such crimes
transform themselves into instruments of
destruction, collapsing in the process the
inherent qualities that makes them human and
alive. Distorting their inherent capacity to feel
the lifeform of the actual other the Nazi doctors
developed what Lifton calls the Auschwitz self.
Defying comprehension, genocide compels
consideration in the hope, perhaps futile, that
awareness of some of the possible mechanisms
behind it, unique to the species of man, may
reduce its probability of recurrence.

This dark chapter ends Part Two.

Part Three is devoted to some clinical and
cognitive science implications of the thesis (q)
and its converse (p).

In chapter 11 will be considered the ways in
which the childhood victim of abuse may try to
cope with the injuries suffered through
developing multiple personalities. In terms of
(p) this involves a divorce from the virtual
other, which then runs its own course and give
rise one or several separate selves. With
reference to cases I shall venture some
reflections on possible paths of recovery. Some
clinicians commenting their own practice will be
cited will be cited in the light of the thesis.

Its conception was prompted by a problem that
have arisen in connection with ideas on
self-organizing systems.7 The question is this:
How can two self-organizing systems, A and B, be
seen to constitute a self-organizing dyad AB
without loss of their respective identifying
organization? I had been grappling with this
problem for a long time until a winter morning
(in February 1986) when I woke up with the
solution in mind:8 The scenery is a harbour with
a large warehouse. I am standing on the dock. Two
container ships come front-end to the dock. The
container wagons of the ships rumble along on
parallel rails that run from the ships over the
wharf and into the warehouse. Standing outside
the warehouse, I am trying to peer in through the
closed side-door of the warehouse at the
container-wagons inside. It is relatively dark
inside, but I manage to see the wagons. They
stand at rest in parallel, on their respective
rails, each with its own load enclosed in the
container. While standing there outside and
peering in, I felt that if some of the bulk in
one of the containers somehow could be shifted
and replaced in the other container, then the
problem would be solved.

Given that the respective organization of both A
and B is already dyadic, involving a virtual
other, then this very same organization can
recreate itself without any qualitative jump,
when each, as an actual other, replaces the
virtual other. The dialogue continues,
irrespective of whether it recreates itself in
the mind's dialogue with itself, that is with the
virtual other, or in dialogue with the actual
other.

A Gordon Research Conference turned out to be the
ideal forum for the first introduction of the
thesis.9

In addition to researchers on child development
and Piagetian constructivism, the
participants10Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von
Glasersfeld, Lynn Hoffmann, Oliver Selfridge, and
Hermina Sinclair. I am grateful to all of them,
on that or on later occasions, for stimulating
comments and valuable references, and also to
many of the other participants. comprised people,
some of them pioneers, in such diverse fields as
cybernetics of self-organizing systems,
neurocomputational simulation of perception, and
family therapy. These fields have generated
questions that invite consideration in the light
of the thesis. Examples are these:

. In view of their different frames and the time
delays in each of them, how is it that two
participants in intimate conversation sometimes
can exhibit a perfect, or near-perfect,
coordination of gestures and movements? (Chapter
14, connecting with chapter 3).

. What is the nature of the process of
transference that may occur during therapeutic
conversation, and how is it that a user in
conversation with a computer program sometimes
may feel himself being understood by the program?
(Chapter 11 - 12, connecting with chapter 4).

. What may be involved in perceptual reversals
upon exposure to ambiguous figures such as
Rubin's vase or the Necker cube, and how is that
in neodissociation experiments a "hidden
observer" appears to be disclosed in some, but
not all, subjects submitted to hypnotic
suggestions? (Chapter 13).

Thus, the remaining chapters concern cognition,
perception, and interbodily coordination. I shall
consider the ways in which understanding is
approached in cognitive science, and offer an
explanation of the so-called Eliza-effect found
by Weizenbaum in some computational contexts.
Some "neurocomputational" simulation explorations
on visual ambiguity in terms of the dyadic
conception of the mind's operation will be
reported from. The issue of divided or unified
consciousness will be considered with reference
to Sperry's split brain studies, Neisser's
studies of attention, and Hilgard's
neodissocation experiments.

In the final chapter interpersonal coordination
will be accounted for in terms of the thesis.
Inviting disconfirmation I shall venture this
qualitative prediction: If persons can be found
to be synchronous with themselves, then one
should be able to register at least some
occurrences of interpersonal synchrony. This
brings me out on thin ice in a double respect.
First, original findings of so-called
"interactional synchrony" have been difficult to
replicate. Second, even though its domain
pertains to observers, not participants,
relativity denies that two persons can be
simultaneous due to their different frames.
Organizing this book I have arrested my
inclination to begin in the abstract with the
history of ideas and then descend to the concrete
level of phenomena purported to be accounted for.
At the same time I have tried to avoid the
fallacy of what Whitehead terms "misplaced
concreteness". In this I may have failed. What we
capture by way of scientific data reflect our own
co-constructions and mediations in the language
at our disposal.

The lived moments of that for which there is no
single English word 11 and which afterwards,
through mediation, is turned into experience,
elude scrutiny and elicit wonder in the sensitive
adult. Our immediate feelings and fleeting
thoughts are transformed as they are turned into
objects of reflection and become experience. For
example, only when there is interruption of a
lived moment of what Stern terms 'affect
attunement' does something emerge as an object
for reflection. That which is experienced is the
loss and absence of the immediate and shared
quality involved in affect attunement. The
attempts in this book to indicate such phenomena
of felt immediacy in the mediational language of
science involve a paradox.

E021291 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1The term 'the virtual other' is new. The general
notion of a virtual entity or process is not a
new one. In physics one speaks of virtual
particles. In computational contexts we may write
a program with virtual properties, for example a
software-implemented virtual machine which in
certain respects may operate as an actual
hardware machine, or a virtual computer memory
that may have some of the efficiency of an actual
hardware computer memory. Thus, as defined by
Charles Sanders Peirce, a virtual X, is
something, not X, which has the efficiency
(virtus) of X. In terms of an identified
operation, this means that an actual X may
replace or be replaced by a virtual, *X, without
change in the identifying characteristics of the
operation. In this respect both differ from a
symbolic representation 'X', albeit this
distinction is not always adhered to in computer
science.

Consistent with the above language use, when I
qualify the other (alter) as a virtual, marking
with a star, *, it means that the virtual alter
*A may replace or be replaced by some actual
alter, A, without changing the form of the
(proto)dialogical inter-operations that occur in
"the communion space" of the virtual alter. Such
inter-operations give rise to the subsequent
formation in this "space" of re-presented or
prototypical altera, 'A1', 'A2',...'An' on the
basis of interactional experiences. The term
"space" is here used metaphorically, as will be
expressions about being "(ful)filled" by the
actual other who replaces the virtual other,
indicating the quality of feelings in such lived
moments.

2S. Bråten (1988): Dialogic Mind: the Infant and
the Adult in Protoconversation. In: M. Carvallo
(ed.): Nature, Cognition and Systems I,
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publ., 187-205.

3C. Trevarthen (1988): Infants trying to talk.
How a child invites communication from the human
world. In: R. Söderbergh (ed.): Children's
creative communication. Lund: Lund University
Press, 1988, pp.9-31.

4L. Murray (1991): Intersubjectivity, Object
Relations Theory and Empirical Evidence from
Mother-Infant Interactions. Infant Mental Health
Journal, Autumn 1991. Lynne Murray considers the
present thesis to offer a bridge between
development psychology and object relations
theory:

5I shall later replace the term "communion" with
the more technical term "dialogic closure"
applying to processes evoked in these primordial
domains. It will be defined in chapter 3. Until
then the term "communion" may suffice (Cf. the
root of and use of commune (Hold intimate
intercourse (with person, one's own heart,
together) (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford
University Press, 1964, p.244)). Various
self-organizing systems notions of operational
closure will be referred to. Examples are
Piaget's notion of auto-regulation (autoréglage)
applied to mental structures, and the principle
of autopoiesis for self-production;
self-creation) applied by Maturana and Varela to
living systems, and by Luhmann to social systems.
Dialogic closure will be defined in a related
sense, albeit qualified as reciprocal and dyadic,
not ego-centric or monadic.

6Konrad Lorenz: Den såkalte ondskap. (Das
sogenannte Böse). Cappelen, Oslo 1968.

7Ref to meeting with Pask and discussions with
Luhmann and Maturana.....S. Bråten (1982):
Simulation and Self-organization of Mind, In:
Contemporary Philosophy Vol. II: Philosophy of
Science (ed. by G. Flöistad) The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, pp. 189-218.

8The idea of the inborn companion space of the
virtual other actually presented itself by way of
this dream:

9Bråten, S. (1986): Consent and Dissent -
Crossing Boundaries during Dialogue. Invited talk
at the Gordon Research Conference on Cybernetics
of Cognition, June 1986, organized by Heinz von
Foerster and Ernst von Glasersfeld. A revised and
extended version has appeared in M. Campanella
(ed.): Between Rationality and Cognition. Torino:
Albert Meynier, 1988, pp. 205-236, with
contributions also by Hayward Alker Jr., Karl
Deutsch, Klaus Krippendorff, Herbert Simon and
others.

10Among those present were these:

11The lack of a single term in English for such
lived moments presents a continuous problem to
the English text of this book. Lived moments in
an immediate sense is termed "Erlebnis" in
German, and "opplevelse" in Norwegian, in
contradistinction to experience (termed Erfahrung
in German and erfaring in Norwegian). In contrast
to experience, entailing something brought 'out'
(ex-) or 'forth' or before the senses as an
object of perception or reflection, Daniel Stern
(personal communication) has suggested the term
"lived moment". In the text I shall mostly adhere
to the complementary use of the qualifying terms
"immediate" and "mediate", or "immediacy" and
"mediacy", to differentiate between domains of
directly lived moments and domains of reflective
experience.

TO SEE THE INDEX OF TEXTS IN THIS SITE, CLICK HERE