[CATEGORY IN INDEX AT STEIN-BRATEN.NET: OPENING
LECTURES]
















Opening keynote lecture at the International
Conferance on Educational Therapy, June 2002,
Lillehammer, Norway (The complete version,
including illustrations, has appeared in the
proceedings ed. A. Arnesen: The Resilient Child:
How coping and resilience promote and develop the
capacity to learn, The Norwegian Educational
Therapist Association 2003:11-29)






The Other-oriented Nature and Nurture of the
Self-organizing Mind:



Roots of resonance and learning to cope in infant
development and evolution




STEIN BRATEN



Theory Forum Network on the Foundations of
(Pre)Verbal Intersubjectivity



Dept of Sociology and Human Geography, University
of Oslo








I thank the programme committee for the
invitation to give this opening keynote talk. I
shall address the phenomenology of mirroring
companions' movements and indicate how virtuous
and vicious circles of re-enactment arise from
children's peculiar capacity for learning from
virtual participation in what others are doing.
Some implications of the discovery of mirror
neurons and other-centred participatory learning
will be indicated for an educational therapy that
is sensitive to the other-oriented nature and
nurture of children's self-organizing minds and
their embodied emotional memories. Finally, I
shall suggest how roots of resilience and
learning to cope and take care may be traced to a
transition stage in human evolution in which
hominid children's capability for participatory
learning from resonant mirroring in face-to-face
situations may have afforded a critical selective
advantage.




Illustrations of mirror resonance: virtual
participation in what the other is doing


First, I invite you to take a look at the
situations portrayed in these photos (including
those underlying the top illustrations in Fig. 1)
and to reflect on what you are seeing.




[Illustrations were presented of infants (11 - 12
months) in diverse cultures feeding their big
sister, including a Yanomami-infant in an Amazona
tribe (drawing after photos by Eibl-Eibesfeldt
1997:486 (fig. 4.88); and an Oslo-boy, Thomas (11
3/4 month), after having been spoon-fed by his
sister, reciprocates by spoon-feeding her
(drawing after photo and video-recording by
Bråten 1996). (The underlying photo of both
series, revealing how the infants' mouth
postures mirror the mouth movements of the
recipient of the food, have been reproduced in
Bråten 1998a:248-9)].




You see here children from various cultures
engaged in feeding others. To the left an Amazona
tribe baby (recorded by Eibl-Eibelsfeldt) is
offering a morsel to his big sister. To the right
an Oslo boy, Thomas, about the same age (11 3/4
months), is reciprocating his big sister's
spoon-feeding. So here we see infants affording
care giving before their first birthday. But what
else do we see? Look at the mouth positions of
the feeders portrayed in the photos. What we see
manifested here, just like what feeding adult do,
is other-centred participation: the feeding
children mirror by their mouth movements the
recipient's mouth movements. Notice how the
Yanomamo baby's mouth is wide open as the
morsel approaches the adult's mouth, and how
the lips tighten as the adult's mouth begins to
close for the bite, and how the Oslo boy, when
reciprocating his sister's spoon-feeding, opens
his own mouth as she receives the spoon with
food. By their mouth movements these children
manifest their altercentric mirroring of the
other's activity, that is, other-centered
resonance of the partner's doing as if their
were co-authoring the other's intake of the
food. Later, with reference to the discovery of
so called "mirror neurons", I shall indicade
how the virtual-other mechanism enabling such
identification with what the other is doing is
neurophysiologically subserved.




The questions


With these feeding situation snapshots as
reference illustrations I shall approach these
questions:




(Q1) What enables infants, before their first
year's birthday, to afford and reciprocate care
giving, such as learning spoon-feeding in
face-to-face situations?




(Q2) What may be the neurobiological basis for
such virtual other-centred participation in what
the caretaker is doing and which enables circular
re-enactment of such activity?




(Q3) What kind of memory is entailed in such
participatory learning -- whether from actual or
virtual hand-guidance?




(Q4) What kinds of virtuous and vicious circles
of re-enactment of care and its reverse may arise
from children's peculiar capacity for learning
by virtual participation?




(Q5) In the therapeutic dialogue, can existential
meaning be assigned to bodily felt events in the
past that were never given a narrative label,
hidden as they were from the child's
declarative memory? In Daniel Stern's terms,
may "a protonarrative envelope", devoid of
any declarative label, be opened in the
therapeutic and educational dialogue?




(Q6) In which evolutionary conditions would
learning by other-centred participation have
afforded the most critical selective advantage
and provide a basis for resilience and for
learning to cope and take care?




Infant capacities and communicative development
in a new perspective


In the last decades some of the story of human
infancy has been re-written, as it were,
replacing earlier theoretical views of infants as
a-social and ego-centric with a new understanding
of infant capacity for interpersonal communion
from the outset.


Recent infancy research has uncovered that
infants are able to engage in interpersonal
communion from the outset, consensually attending
and bodily attuning to one another's emotive
expressions and gesture- and sound-producing
movements. It is demonstrated by the
documentations of neonatal imitation and of
protoconversation in the first months of life.


Such sociality and other-orientation from the
outset do not fit the auto-enclosed and
ego-centric point of departure for child
development which was posited in the first
quarter of this century, by Freud in terms of the
pleasure principle that had to be replaced by the
reality principle, and Piaget who defined a long
developmental period of de-centration before
sociality and intersubjectivity could emerge.
Unlike the ladder-metaphor that may be attributed
child developmen in traditional theories,
according to which only the higher stages entail
sociability and a return to lower stages entails
"infantile regression", in the new infant
research perspective we use the metaphor of a
staircase (cf. the COMM.figure below) in which
each of the lower steps endure throughout life
underlying and in support of higher-order steps.


This new understanding is manifest in the title
and contents of these two volumes: In Daniel
Stern's seminal book "The Interpersonal World
of the Infant" (Basic Books 1995), he specifies
the domain of intersubjective relatedness
connecting the infant's subjective self with
evoked and actual companions. In the collective
volume on "Intersubjective Communication and
Emotion in Early Ontogeny" which I have
published (Cambridge University Press 1998), the
very authors of findings at odds with the
traditional Freudian and Piagetian view of infant
and child development provide documentation and
interpretations, examining different levels of
intersubjective attunement in early human
development arising from the foundations of
infant intersubjectivity which Trevarthen was the
first to define in the 1970's. Here we offer
accounts, with a comparative eye also on autism
and non-human primate behaviours, of infant
capacities and sociabilities which may be
allocated to these COM1M2-steps of
intersubjective attunement and understanding in
early child development:




M.2: Meta-communication and understanding of
other minds


M.1: Meanings mediated in verbal conversation by
symbols and self-reflection


O: Object-oriented joint attention and cultural
learning by other-centred participation


C: Communion in the primary mode of
intersubjective attunement and shared vitality
contours




Figure:. Steps in early communicative
development, with each lower step enduring and
supporting higher-order steps throughout life
(cf. Stern 1985; Braten 1998a; red. 1998).




(C) Communion in mutual subject-subject
engagements from the first weeks after birth


newborn imitation, even in the first hour after
birth (video glimpses will be shown) and
protoconversation in the first months of life.
For example, Kuguimutzakis has video-records
(which will be shown) of 45-minutes-olds
attempting to imitate his uttering /a/, and in
her studies of speech perception Kuhl finds that
by 6 months infants are beginning to turn "the
deaf ear" to sound distinctions that make no
sense in the ambient language. Such primary
intersubjective attunement in a dyadic reciprocal
format of protoconversation prepares for and
supports higher-order abilities later in life
(cf. the chapters by Braten; Kugiumutzakis; Kuhl,
Meltzoff & Moore; Murray; Rommetveit; and
Trevarthen in Braten (Ed.) 1998).




(O) Object-oriented, secondary intersubjective
attunement when infants join others in shared
attention about objects, and other-centred
learning by imitation to manipulate objects (from
about 6-9 months). For example, Meltzoff reports
that nine-month-old learners re-enact
object-manipulation they have seen enacted the
previous day; and that 18 month-olds "read the
intention" of an adult who tries to pull a
dumbbell apart, and I have shown that already by
eleven months, infants can reciprocate
caregivers' acts. Such object-oriented cultural
learning in a triangular format opens for
semantic learning (cf.. chapters by Braten;
Meltzoff & Moore, Akhtar & Tomasello; and Hobson
in Bråten (ed.), 1998).




(M1) Mediate symbolic communication and verbal
conversation of first-order (from 24 months).
Tertiary intersubjective understanding entailing
predication -- two-year-olds, having begun their
first predications and soon beginning to engage
in verbal conversation. Usage of personal
pronouns, such as "I" "mine", and
"You", usually coincides with the
two-year-old's recognition of herself or
himself in the mirror, and with a sense of verbal
self and narrative self and other (Stern, 1985)
coming to be expressed in conversational and
narrative speech (cf.. chapters by Akhtar &
Tomasello, Harris, Hobson, in Breten (ed.) 1998).




(M2) Meta-communication and second-order
understanding of other's understanding ,
including theory of simulation of other minds
(theory-of-mind) (from 3 - 6 years of age). Such
understanding of others' minds and emotion
(Dunn, 1998) opens for perspective-taking and
emotional absorption, even in fictional others
(Harris, 1998), probably supported by the
capacity for altercentric participation,
identified already in infants (cf. chapters by
Braten, Dunn, and Harris in Braten (ed.) 1998).
For example, in an Oxford study, Rall & Harris
(2000) find that when 3- and 4-year-olds are
asked to retell fairytales, say about Cinderella,
they manage best when the verbs in the stories
listened to are consistent with the stance of the
protagonist with whom they identify, inviting
their altercentric participation in
'Cinderella's slippers', as it were. The
children have trouble when the verbs in the
stories told are used from the reverse
perspective, at odds with their
perspective-taking. In verbal conversation
partners, such simulation of mind (Braten 1973,
1974) by virtue of altercentric
perspective-taking enables them to complete one
another's utterances and to reply to one
another's half-spoken questions.




Thus, preverbal capacities and opportunities for
cultural learning in early infancy, including the
capacity for altercentric (speech) perception and
perspective-taking, nurture and support the
higher-order level abilities for conversational
and narrative speech and simulation of mind.




When infants and toddlers afford and reciprocate
care giving


Within the above horizon, let us now return to
the opening illustrations of the Oslo boy
reciprocating his sister's spoon-feeding before
his first year's birthday. Now, in order for
Thomas to learn to reciprocate the spoon-feeding
he has not only experienced being spoon-fed, but
must somehow have felt to take a part in the
feeder's activity from the feeder's stance,
as if he were co-authoring the feeding, even
though his parent or sister has been the actual
author of the previous feeding. Moreover, sitting
face-to-face while having been spoon-fed, the
infant's re-enactment of the activity of the
feeder as a model depends on sensori-motoric
reversal, i.e. mirror reversal of the model's
movements in order for the infant to feel to be
virtually moving with the model's movements.


This I term altercentric participation., i.e.
other-centred virtual participation in what the
other is doing as if being hand-guided. That
enables the infant to participate in the
caretaker's movements from the caretaker's
stance, entailing a virtual co-enactment of the
caretaker's movements as if the infant were
hand-guided or a co-author of the caretaker's
activity. Such other-centred participation in the
caretaker's movements affords the infant to
share specific temporal contours of feeling flow
patterns, which Stern (1999) calls 'vitality
contours', and invites circular re-enactment in
similar situations from a bodily felt participant
memory, not necessarily conscious, of the manner
in which the activity has been virtually
co-enacted and the feeling that directs the
enactment.


This capacity for other-centred participation has
bearings for prosocial behaviour in a twofold
way, first by enabling the child to share in a
peer's felt need or distress and, second, by
having learnt to offer care by altercentric
participation in caregivers. Thus, when peers in
need or distress reactivate in the child shared
feelings by virtue of altercentric participation
in the peer, semblant of the form of bodily
self-feelings evoked in situations in which the
infant has been helped or comforted, then such
peer situations should invite re-enactment
towards the peer of the kind of care giving in
which the infant has felt to virtually
participate when previously afforded care.


To expect care giving by infants is at odds with
traditional theories of child development that
viewed the infant as awaiting a long period of
development before becoming social and, indeed,
prosocial. Even so, and even though it did not
affect her father's theory, Anna Freud has been
a pathfinder by her empirical documentation of
early prosociality. For example, in the studies
of Infant without families in wartime nurseries
during the Second World War, she reports with
Dorothy Burlingham, about the episode with Rose
(19 months) and Edith (17 months): Rose is
sitting at the table and drinking her cocoa when
Edith climbs up and tries to take the mug from
Rose's mouth. Rose looks at her in surprise, then
turns the mug and holds it for Edith so that
Edith can drink the cocoa. Here is a nurturing
and sharing act, perhaps even altruistic, arising
from virtual participation in Edith's effort to
get a drink. And by turning the mug so that Edith
can drink from Edith's position, reverse to
that of Rose, she demonstrates altercentricity
and may have re-enacted that kind of drinking
help she herself previously has been afforded.


Such occurrences, like the episode with Thomas,
of re-enactment of the care-giving afforded by
care-givers, I see as evidence of the early
capacity for altercentric participation in
others. Both nature and nurture is at play here.


First, nature plays its part in the sense that
infants have the altercentric capacity to engage
in others in the mode of felt immediacy, that is,
in other children in need and in the models that
afford learning.


Second, nurture plays its part in the sense that
virtual other-centred participation in the
care-giving movements and accompanying feelings
affords infants with an experiential ground for
potential re-enactment towards others, including
the caregivers..




During verbal conversation


We may even observe the manifestations of such
virtual participation in what the other is doing
in verbal conversation between speech-competent
partners. Conversation partners manifest their
virtual other-centred participation inter alia by
sentence completion as an overt manifestation of
such virtual participation in the other's
production. This I have modeled in terms of
co-actor simulation of one another's production
and understanding in a cybernetic model, put
forward in the early 1970's (Bråten 1973, 1974)
-- the first model to articulate the simulation
version of theory-of-mind approaches in
psychology and philosophy. As I would phrase it
today in terms of altercentric participation,
when you find yourself more or less unwittingly
completing what your conversation partner is
about to say, you overtly manifest your virtual
participation in the other's speech act as if
you were a virtual co-author, enabled by a
virtual-other mechanism, i.e. by an other-centred
mirror system adapted in phylogeny to subserve
preverbal and verbal conversational efficiency.
This, then, is clearly operational also in the
preverbal mind.




Learning by altercentric participation defined


Let me now summarize the defining operational
characteristics of learning by altercentric
participation. This is imitational learning by
Ego from Alter which




(1) in face-to-face situation entails perceptual
mirror reversal of Alter's enactment,


(2) evoking sensori-motor engagement in Alter's
movements in a participatory sense involving
virtual co-enactment of Alter's movements as if
Ego were hand-guided and a co-author of Alter's
activity,


(3) giving rise to shared temporal vitality
(affects) contours, reflecting the manner in
which the enactment is felt to be virtually
co-enacted and the feeling that directs the
co-enactment,


(4) enabling circular re-enactment from
e-motional memory of such virtual co-enactments.


Thus, infants learn to re-enact from altercentric
perception of their caregiver's enactment as if
they had been hand-guided from the caregivers'
stance.




Virtual and actual hand-guidance. Deficits in
altercentric identification


When this altercentric capacity is biologically
impaired, the mirror reversal and identification
required will present problems, for example, to
subjects with autism. Their revealed difficulties
in gestural imitation in face-to-face situations,
in reverting and matching the facing model's
gesture, such as grasp thumb or peek-a-boo, or
simply raising arms (Ohta, 1987; Whiten & Brown,
1998) has been predicted and explained in terms
of deficits in altercentric perception (Braten
1998), and independently confirmed in a study of
autism by Hobson & Lee (1999) describing this
deficit in terms of a lacking capacity for
identification with the model.


As you know, when teaching a manual task to
children with learning problems, it helps to
hand-guide them, or in the case of children with
autism, at least to face the same direction as
the child. Also for ordinary children, when the
task is complex, hand-guidance afford the learner
to experience actual co-enactment of task as
basis for subsequent re-enactment. In ordinary
cases, observations of the model in face-to-face
situations usually suffice. The infant learn to
perform from virtual participation in the
model's movements as if they had been
hand-guided. Thus, their virtually moving with
the model as if being virtually hand-guided, like
a child with learning problems who is actually
hand-guided, may conform to the same
operationally closed format of a dynamic dyadic
system of co-enacted movements from a shared
stance.




The question of neurobiological support: mirror
neurons


Let me now turn to the question of possible
neurophysiological support for such a capacity,
i.e. whether there may be neurobiological basis
for altercentric participation in the
caretaker's or model's activity enabling
circular re-enactment of such activity.




When the sight of another's motor activity
evoke premotor units: discovery of mirror neurons


A pertinent discovery has been made in non-human
primates. On the basis of their study of
functional organization of the macaque monkey
brain, Rizzolatti et al. (1988) have suggested
that premotor neurons are activated in
anticipation of a purposive movement, for
example, grasping a piece of food. De Pellegrino,
Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese and Rizzolatti (1992)
designed an experimental situation pertaining to
this question: Could such premotor neurons be
activated merely by the sight of another's
grasping the food out of one's own reach?




[Illustration presented of a macaque monkey
watching a morsel being grasped and grasping the
morsel. In both these situations -- (left) when
the monkey is observing a morsel-grasping
movement by the experimenter, and (right) when
the monkey is reaching for the morsel to grasp
it, there is "mirror neuron" cell firing in
the monkey's brain (Drawing based on a video
recording presented by Rizzolatti (2000). Cf.
also Di Pellegrino et al. (1992) who also picture
the activation profiles of a mirror neuron in
these two situations; and Fig.5.5 in Bråten (ed)
1998:p.122))].




In the first situation (left) the monkey watches
the experimenter grasping a piece of food on a
plate out of reach of the monkey. In the next
situation (right) a plate with a piece of food is
offered to the monkey who reaches for food.
Premotor cell activation in the monkey is
recorded in both situations: first, by the sight
of the grasping movements of the experimenter;
second, by the animal's own grasping movements.
This could indicate that the sight of the
experimenter's grasping the piece of food
evokes virtual grasping in the monkey, activating
the same kinds of networks that combine with
others to subserve the monkey's own grasping.
Thus, there is mirror neuron activation in both
situations of seeing food being grasped and
preparing to reach for food. The discovery of
such pre-motor mirror neurons by Rizzolatti and
his University of Parma group has clear
implications for our understanding of how
learning by altercentric participation is
subserved (examined in Bråten (ed.)
1998:105-124) and for questions about the
evolutionary emergence of dialogue (examined at
an international conference at the Hanse
Institute of Advanced Study in July 2000 on
"Mirror neurons and the evolution of brain and
language). Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) spell out
some of the possible implications for
understanding how the first primitive dialogue
may have emerged from such a mirror system, and
I, having predicted that such a discovery would
be made, have specified how the system may
subserve the virtual-other mechanism enabling
altercentric perception, including mirror
reversal in face-to-face situations (cf. our
respective contributions in Stamenov & Gallese
(eds) 2002).


Thus, there appear to be potential
neurophysiological support, or at least part of a
neurosocial basis for the kind of processes I
have described and specified as our capacity to
virtually move with the movements of others, and
hence for infant' circular re-enactment of
goal-directed movements which have felt to be
co-enacted by virtue of other-centred
participation. For example, it seems reasonable
to assume that an othercentred mirror system for
matching or simulating others' acts may afford
a precursory and nurturing path to simulation of
other minds, i.e. the ability that becomes
operational at the second order step M2 in the
communicative staircase indicated previously (cf.
Braten, 1998ab, Gallese & Goldman, 1998), and
that such preverbal capacity for virtual
participation in what others are doing are likely
to support the kind of inner feedback loops
manifested even in verbal conversation when for
example, the listener completes the speaker's
aborted statement or replies to a question only
partly formulated.




What kind of memory is involved?


And now to the question about the kind of memory
that may be involved in other-centred
participation. I submit that we are here dealing
with a kind of "e-motional" memory that is
embodied, but not submitted to a declarative or
verbal processing and labelling. By "e-motional
memory" I mean here the affective remembrance
-- which is not conceptual and may not be
conscious -- of virtually moving with Alter's
movements leaving Ego with a characteristic
vitality contour and procedural memory of the
virtual co-enactment which may be evoked for
re-enactment in similar situations. The composite
term "e-motional" combines the folk sense of
being 'moved by' and the root sense
'out-of-motion'. We could also use Fogel's
(in press) term "participatory memory" to
denote this particular and peculiar memory that
arises from virtual participation in the
model's or instructor's doing as if the child
were the co-author of the doings from the
model's or instructor's stance. This is
other-cenetred participatory learning, leaving
the learner with an e-motional memory of that
virtual participation.


Thus, from e-motional memory of virtually moving
with the sound- or gesture-producing movements of
the (m)other, infants can re-enact the movements
they have felt to be virtually co-enacting. This
enables the young learner to participate in the
movements from the model's stance as if the
infant learner were hand-guided or a co-author of
the model's activity. Such learning by virtual
other-centred participation enables 11-12-month
olds to reciprocate and re-enact the caregiving
to which they have been subjected from e-motional
memory of having virtually co-enacted the
caretaker's activity, and which in face-to-face
situations entails perceptual mirror reversal.




Circular re-enactment of care giving


In an environment affording care, the infant gets
recurrent opportunities to not just be subjected
to care but to feel to be virtually co-enacting
such care giving, inviting circular re-enactment
from e-motional memory of such care giving if and
when others in need or distress reactivate in the
child feelings semblant of the form of bodily
self-feelings evoked in situations in which the
infant has experienced care giving, and hence
activating circular re-enactment of care.


Then others in need or distress may invite caring
efforts resembling the caring afforded by others
earlier in infancy from e-motional memory of
having virtually participated in that care
giving. Altercentric participation is at play in
a twofold way here: first, by the part it plays
in learning from caregivers; second, by the way
in which it may be elicited by others in need or
distress activating circular re-enactment of
caregiving offered to them.




Child abuse inviting circular re-enactment of
abuse


Why is it that abused toddlers have been found to
more likely to be abusive to other children? In
the way that sensitive caregiving invites
circular re-enactment we should also expect that
experiences of abuse may come to invite circles
of re-enactment. A radical entailment of the
capacity to learn by other-centred participation,
is that the victim in an abuse situation --
before defence mechanisms set in -- may be
virtually co-enacting the abuser's activity,
i.e. compelled not only to be a victim, but to be
a co-author of the abuse, calling for circular
re-enactment as one of several potential paths
open to the victim.


Circular re-enactment of abuse somehow entails
that the child victim has been compelled not just
to suffer the victim part, but to feel to
participate in the abusive movements, sharing the
vitality contours reflecting the manner of abuse
and the feelings that direct the abuse. In virtue
of such altercentric participation the victim may
come to experience engagement in the bodily
motions and feelings of the abuser, not just the
suffering. That leaves the victim with a
compelling bodily and emotional remembrance that
increases the likelihood of circular re-enactment
of abuse in peer relations or towards younger
children later in ontogeny from e-motional memory
of having virtually participated in actual
alter's abuse, while suffered by the victim's
bodily ego.




Empirical support: abused toddlers are more
likely to become abusive than other toddlers


Thus, prior to defence mechanisms setting in, the
abused child is not just a victim of the abuse,
but virtually takes a part in the abusive and
hurtful event as a co-enactor of the abuse,
inviting as one of several paths an increased
likelihood of circular re-enactment of abusive
behaviour towards other potential victims.


The above implies that children who have
experienced caretaking or parenting in a harsh,
punitive, neglecting or abusive manner should be
more likely to respond with fear, anger, or even
attack peers or younger children in distress, as
compared to responses by children with a
different experiential background. Empirical
studies point in this direction. For example,
observing abused toddlers abusing other infants
George and Main (1985) indicate a vicious circle
in the early impact of the quality of the
caretaking background. Severely abused toddlers
have been observed at a day-care centre to react
fearfully or aggressive towards other children in
distress, and by the second year of their life to
re-enact the abusive behaviour of their parents.
Some of the toddlers found to having been abused
were never observed to express obvious concern
for another child in distress. Sometimes, they
even tormented the other child until it began
crying and then, while smiling, mechanically
patted or attempted to quiet the crying child
(George and Main 1985; Harris 1989).


There is thus a double vicious circle in the
tragedy of child victims of abuse. Not only are
they deprived of full emotional holding quality
in their own life. By virtue of circular
re-enactment from e-motional memory of abuse,
some of them may even later in ontogeny be driven
to deprive others of that same quality of life,
or pursue different paths, including divorcing
the bodily self from the victim's virtual
other, each running different independent courses.


Again, as in the case of circular re-enactment of
care, no conceptual or verbal "memory" is
required for experiences of abuse in felt
immediacy to give rise to re-enactment. Indeed,
men and women who have been subjected to incest
and abuse in their infancy or early childhood may
first come to realize that they may have been
victims when a crisis breaks out in adult years.
But while the experience of abuse is not
re-presented in virtue of any conceptual memory,
the child is certainly affected in the most
profound way. That is why the composite term
e-motional "memory" is useful to denote the
affective experience and remembrance of moving
with the other's motions that afford the infant
the feeling of participating in the movement and
accompanying emotions. Different from
higher-order conceptual memory, this kind of
"e-motional memory" will be ineffaceably affected
by abusive motions felt to be co-enacted, and
increase the likelihood of circular re-enactment
of the previously felt co-enacted movements later
in ontogeny. This may be why is it that some
childhood victims of abuse entertain a feeling of
guilt, and that others only by virtue of a crisis
in adulthood realize that they may have been
victims of abuse in their childhood


It need not come to circular re-enactment of
abuse. For one thing, evolution has afforded
roots of resilience, and competitive experiences
may afford alternative models. Thus, several
paths are open to the victim. One such
alternative path is to disengage from the body
subjected to abuse, or to divorce the bodily ego
from the virtual alter, each running their
separate course. Circular re-enactment of abuse
may be also be prevented if the previous
victim's capacity for altercentric
participation is not "turned off" in relation
to other potential victims, unless pain-seeking
has become a motivating force.


Such virtuous and vicious circles of
intergeneration re-enactment may be seen to evoke
different kinds of characteristic vitality
contours entailing what Stern (1995, 1999) terms
protonarrative envelopes which -- while being
extra-linguistic and nonconceptual -- await
re-opening and transcendence in relations to
others later in life. Vicious circles of
re-enactment of abuse, as well as other paths
pursued by the victim, for example, divorce of
the victim's virtual other from the bodily self
in what used to be called "multiple personality
disorders", entail a 'past' hidden from
consciousness, and which is devoid of existential
meaning in a sense of .being brought to bear in
the phenomenological present.




Recapitulation and summary so far


And now, let me summarize the succinct replies
offered to the first four questions:




(Q1) Regarding the question about infants
affording and reciprocating care giving, I have
indicated how the infant feels to be virtually
co-enacting the model's performance, as if the
infant were hand-guided, and which in
face-to-face situations entails perceptual mirror
reversal of the demonstration afforded by the
model, and as for infants who reciprocate care
giving -- I have exemplified with spoon-feeding
situations how such participatory learning comes
about by the way in which the infant when
previously subjected to such caregiving, have
felt to be virtually co-enacting the
caregiver's activity. As for defining
characteristics and overt manifestation of
virtual participation in what others are doing I
have given examples of that, from feeding
situations, from the Olympic arena, and also how
conversation partners manifest their virtual
other-centred participation. Such overt
manifestations also opens a way for identifying
in classroom situations, as well as in other
interactive group situation, observable
manifestations of inclusion.




(Q2) Regarding neurobiological -- or I should
rather say neurosocial -- support of the mirror
connectivity involved in altercentric
participation -- I have referred to the discovery
of mirror neurons in macaque monkey studies and
to the identification of a mirror system in the
human brain, and which we may assume subserve the
virtual-other mechanism enabling altercentric
perception.




(Q3) Regarding the question of what kind of
memory is involved in learning by altercentric
participation -- I have suggested how such
virtual other-centered participation in the model
leaves the learner with e-motional memory of
temporal contours of shared vitality affects,
reflecting the manner in which the act is
performed and the feelings accompanying the
co-enacted movements that invite circular
re-enactment in similar situations. I have shown
also how this may afford an explanatory reply to
questions (Q4) about victims of abuse.




(Q4) Regarding the finding that abused toddlers
are likely to be abusive to other children I have
offered this answer: While a reversing of
position from victim to abuser which would be
difficult to understand in a traditional
perspective, it may be expected from the kind of
potential vicious circle evoked by virtual-other
participation in the abuser's offence Before
defence mechanisms set in, the victim may be
compelled to feel to be virtually co-enacting the
abuser's activity. Such altercentric
participation in the abuse may come to compel
circular re-enactment of abuse, while there may
be also several other potential paths open to the
victim.




(Q 5) And now to the critical question about
whether existential meaning can be assigned to
such traumatic events in the past hidden, as they
were, from the victim's declarative memory: In
contrast, e-motional memory, or that which Alan
Fogel (in press) terms "participatory
memory", is per definition non-verbal, hidden
in the body or the heart, as it were. He points
the possibility of allowing for what Dan Stern
terms "now-moments" - Aha-insights which may
allow for such hidden memories to be accessed and
hence transformed in the intersubjective present.
In the therapeutic dialogue, existential meaning
and hence, transcendence, may be assigned in the
intersubjective present constituted in dialogue
with the other -- virtual or actual -- provided
that the child is allowed to be a dialogical
participant in a shared inquiry.


One thing is to break the abuser's "model
power" to define the situation to which the
child victim may submit, even when feeling in his
or her heart and body that something is terribly
wrong. Another, much more difficult challenge, is
to re-activate participatory e-motional memory,
locked in the body in a pre-verbal or non-verbal
manner. In a phenomenological and existential
sense, I have suggested with G.H. Mead that the
past can only exist in the intersubjective
present holding the promise of an emergent future
that invites a re-definition of the past brought
out in the open to be meaningfully contained in
the intersubjective present shared with
dialogical companions.


And yet, the protonarrative envelopes of
traumatic 'pasts", locked in e-motional
memory, hidden and yet retained as they has been
by a bodily e-motional memory outside awareness
and verbal narratives, denied any consciously
declared narrative label, need somehow to be
assigned an existential and phenomenological
meaning in order to be opened in the
intersubjective present. Brought out in the open
to be meaningfully contained in the
intersubjective present shared with dialogical
companions as an actualized past, it may open for
an emergent future that invites this past to be
acknowledged and then re-written in view of the
emergent future created in the present in
co-authorship with the other -- actual and
virtual.


In Harlene Anderson's (1997) terms: how can a
shared inquiry open for "a process of forming,
saying, and expanding the unsaid and yet-to-be
said"? Being aware of the way in the
therapist's potential model power may come into
play, expected by the child to be the source of
the only valid replies, and hence transforming
the conversation into a monological conversation,
she and Harold Goolishian try to avoid becoming
the "narrative editor" (Anderson 1997:96).


G.H. Mead made the point that nothing exists --
no past, no future -- except in the present, in
the extended present that includes an emergent
future as well as a past, resembling perhaps
Husserl's view of the present. Mead adds,
however, that the emergent future contained in
the present demands a "re-writing" of the
past contained in the present. Now, if that is
the case, then I suggest that existential meaning
can only be assigned in the intersubjective
present constituted in dialogue with the other --
actual or virtual -- holding the promise of an
emergent future that invites definition and
re-definition of the past brought out in the open
to be meaningfully contained in the
intersubjective present constituted with
sensitive dialogical companions who, to use
Buber's terms, do not transform the I-You
dialogue into an I-It conversation in which means
and ends are introduced,.


The threefold meaning of the term "present" gives
a clue for tentative replies to the last
question, and pertaining to the therapist-child
relationship: First, they are present to one
another, in each other's presence; second, they
are in one another's present, partially sharing
here and now, and third, each one is offering
herself or himself as a gift, as a present, for
such intersubjective sharing which may be
communion or communication constituting a shared
and novel intersubjective present. Thus, qua
educational therapists you are present to the
children ~ as they are present to you, not just
with their mouth and conceptual mind, but with
their body and which may open for an I-You
dialogue in Buber's sense.


Such virtual participation in Alter's act as if
ego were a co-author of the act or being
hand-guided from Alter's stance, is sometimes
unwittingly manifested overtly, not only when
opening one's own mouth when putting a morsel
into another's mouth. We may see it
demonstrated, for example, as I shall show you in
a video glimpse, when our princess Märtha Louis
jumped in her spectator box as she was watching
her horse jump to cross the last and difficult
hinder at the Olympic Games in Sidney summer
2000. This capability to identify with what the
other is doing from the other's stance provides
the infant learner with an efficient entrance
into the culture into which the infant is born,
learning to cope and take care.


This mode arises from intersubjective communion
with the model by virtue of a Virtual-Other
mechanism which enables mirroring of the
model's goal directed movement.


Ten years ago, at the 7th International
Educational Therapy conference here in Oslo, I
spelt out some of the implications of children
being born with the virtual other in mind for
understanding attachment, pointing to the key to
the self-creative autonomy of the learning child,
demanding respect of the parent, the educator and
therapist. While invited to engage with the child
in a synchronic dance, in which they may know the
steps better, they would have to find the shared
rhythm and resonance to swing with the child
(Sophie Freud, 1989) and to leave room for the
child's own self-creative and resilient dancing
with the child's virtual other. While we
usually takes learning in dialogue to mean just
learning by dialogue with actual others, there
are also creative dialogical cycles within the
child, as identified by Winnicott in transitional
phenomena , i.e. the child's self-creative
engagements with what I term the child's
virtual other. The challenge to the guiding adult
is threefold, I then pointed out: First, to let
go, from time to time, of one's own controlling
self bent on achieving successful outcomes in
representational mediacy, and instead open for
intersubjective engagement with the child in felt
immediacy. Second, to be ready to comply with the
child's invitation to engage in dialogue, or --
if not so invited -- to patiently wait for
openings to step into the child's dance. Third,
to leave time and space for the child to
creatively continue the dance by herself, that
is, with her virtual other; and to be ready to be
let in on, and appreciate, the creative outcome
of such self-engagements. As I said then, we all
bear within us this capacity to engage with
actual others in felt immediacy and to
self-engage with our inner virtual other. That is
the common base of learning through dialogue
(Bråten in Gomnæs & Osborne (eds.) 1993:25-38)




On roots of resilience and learning to cope and
take care in human evolution


And now to the question (Q6) about evolution,
about the possible roots of resilience and of ..


this capacity for virtual-other dialogue and
participatory learning. The questions are these:


In which evolutionary conditions would
altercentric perception have afforded the most
critical selective advantage? Deprived as they
were by their parents' bipedalism of the
body-clinging advantage enjoyed by young
offsprings of apes, how could hominid children
learn to cope and take care, and in turn become
pedagogic parents?




Comparing adult-infant relations and
infant-carrying modalities in humans and
chimpanzees


Based inter alia on my comparative studies for a
decade of infant-adult relations in humans and
chimpanzees, my speculative reply is this:
Compensating for the lost protective and
nurturing advantage of offsprings clinging to
their mother's body which may be attributed to
Miocene apes, such an adapted mirror system would
have made a critical difference to Pliocene
hominids, and to early Homo erectus before the
invention of baby-carriers which would have
restored some of the lost advantage continued to
be enjoyed by modern apes (Fig. 3 (left)).




[Pictorial illustrations are presented of
back-riding offspring of great apes, and of an
infant being carried in baby sling attributed to
a Homo Erectus mother, accompanied by this text:
Deprived as they were by their parents'
bipedalism of the body-clinging advantage enjoyed
by young offsprings of apes, how could hominid
children learn to cope and take care, and in turn
become pedagogic parents? Clinging to the
mother's body, offsprings of great apes are
afforded opportunities to learn and orient
themselves without transcending own body-centred
stance. While probably enjoyed also by ancestral
Miocene apes, this protective body-clinging
learning advantage would have had to be
compensated by the children of Pliocene hominids
and early Homo erectus, and especially before the
invention (perhaps by Homo erectus mothers) of
baby-carrying device. Before the invention of
baby slings they would have to depend on
capacities to learn from a distance by
other-centred participation to cope and take
care. Herein may be the phylogenetic root of
resonance and resilience.




Not only would they have had to resort to
"mental clinging" in Bowlby's sense of
attachment. In order to compensate for the loss
of the protective and instructive mode of
actually moving with their mother's body, they
would have had to depend on face-to-face modes of
communion and on cultural learning by virtually
moving with observed models. Mother-infant pairs
capable of protoconversation and joint visual
attention, would have had a selective advantage
in both contributing to and drawing upon an
emerging protolanguage cultural environment, and
in particular before the invention of
baby-carrying slings, which Richard Leakey
attributes to Homo erectus in this scenario:


"[w]e see a small human group, five adult females
and a cluster of infants and youths. they are
athletic in stature, and strong. They are
chattering loudly, some of their exchanges
obvious social repartees, some the discussion of
today's plans [...] to gather plant foods [...].
Three of the females are now ready to leave,
naked apart from an animal skin thrown around the
shoulders that serves the dual role of baby
carriers and, later, food bag." (Leakey
1995:93-97)




In some contemporary African cultures, unlike
many Western cultures, such baby-bags are still
in use, for example, in the Gusii culture, where
often a sibling of the infant is assigned the
task of carrying the infant on the back (LeVine &
LeVine, 1988), and where face-to-face interplay
with infants by looking or talking is relatively
rare:




Virtually all of [the Gusii mothers']
interaction with the babies includes holding or
carrying, and they often respond to infant vocal
or visual signals with physical contact rather
than reciprocal talking or looking. By contrast,
the Boston mothers, who hold their babies in less
than a third of their interactions from 6 months
onward, seek to engage their infants in visual
and verbal communication at a distance. (LeVine
et al., 1996:198).




Compensating for the loss of instructive and
protective body-clinging advantage


Taking after the facial expressions,
vocalizations and gestures of adults is a way to
ensure connectivity and learning even at a
distance. In phylogeny, when distinguishing
hominid cultures from patterns in other primates,
we may thus speculate that an enhanced mirror
system subserving face-to-face pedagogy and
learning in situations inviting transition of own
body-centred stance, may have afforded necessary
roots of resilience, compensating for the loss of
the instructive and protective advantage enjoyed
by offsprings of other apes. It may have
facilitated the transition to what Donald (1991)
terms 'mimetic culture'. This entails a
tool-designing pedagogy and mimetic learning by
hand-guidance and, I would add, learning by
altercentric participation (virtual
hand-guidance). Donald also argues for the
transitional role of a mimetic Homo erectus
culture towards a narrative (mythic) culture. An
evolved capacity for altercentric perception in
face-to-face learning and warning situations may
have been precursory and supportive of later
conversational speech adaptation in archaic
humans. To infants endowed with the capacity for
virtual (other) participation in gesticulating
and articulating others, an emerging ambient
speech language, perhaps accompanied by a
speech-mediated pedagogy, would have afforded
opportunities for their beginning to attune
themselves by altercentric speech perception to
the prosody and rhythm of the emerging language
culture into which they were born.


Thus I have ventured a speculative reply to the
last question (Q6) about evolutionary conditions
in which learning by other-centred participation
would have afforded the most critical selective
advantage entailing children's capacities to
learn by other-centred participation to cope and
take care. Herein we may find the phylogenetic
roots of resonance and resilience in children.




Notes




1. Opening keynote lecture at 11th International
Conference of Educational Therapy, Lillehammer
June 3-5 2002. Parts are based on a talk the
First Århus Conference on Existential
Psychotherapy, Århus, Denmark Dec.3-5 1999
(printed in this bilingual essay collection on
Dialogue in Infant & Adult: Stein Braten:
Modellmakt og altersentriske spedbarn. Bergen:
Sigma 2000:244-260).




2. This mode arises from intersubjective
communion with the model by virtue of a
Virtual-Other mechanism which enables mirroring
of the model's goal directed movement. This
phenomenon has been uncovered by way of inference
from a postulate which I put forward at a Gordon
Research Conference on Cybernetics of Cognition
in 1986. Criticising and transcending
Maturana's notion of autopoiesis in biology of
cognition for its monadological implications, I
proposed that we are born with an intersubjective
companion space with an inner Virtual Alter
complementing our bodily Ego with the same
operational efficiency (Latin: virtus) as an
actual Alter, and which hence invites and permits
reciprocal engagements with others from birth
(Braten 1988ab).




3. I refer you also to Hallvard Hastein's
classroom studies in terms of altercentric
participation currently being carried out in some
schools in the southern parts of Norway from the
perspectives of inclusion and exclusion




4. Postscript: After my talk, Elaine Arnold, who
has studied the separation and reunion of
Afro-Caribbean children, mentioned that she had
observed a difference with respect to (the lack
of) facial expressions, and wondered if it may
have something to do with the way in which the
had been carried: While some African children
(having been carried on the back) showed a lack
of facial expressions, Caribbean children, who
were more in communication with the adult
carriers, were more open with regard to facial
expressions.




5. Some putative evolution stages towards speech
culture (partly in line with Donald, 1991) may be
compared to precursory and supportive steps
towards speech in infant and child development
(cf.. Braten (ed.) 1998). But there is this
critical difference: While evolution of speech
has entailed the creation of novel linguistic
oceans never before in existence, the child in
development is born into an already existing
linguistic ocean of talk in which the child so
rapidly and efficiently learn to swim, as it
were. In dialogue, for example, the "attunement
to the attunement of the other" (Rommetveit,
1998:360) appears to be prepared for by the
mutual, dance-like interplay which we can observe
already in the first weeks after birth.




6. Presented to the Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters, Febr.10, 2000, and at the conference
on "Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain
and Language", Hanse Institute for Advanced
Studies, Delmenhorst July 5-8 2000.


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