14 - Through feeling and sight to self and symbol

Summary

To know oneself is to know oneself as a person among others. In order to acquire a developed concept of self, therefore, children need to appreciate the nature of persons and to recognize the existence of other selves with whom they have much in common but from whom they are differentiated. A principal concern of this chapter is to consider how very young children come to apprehend their commonality with other people and grasp the ways in which different selves occupy distinct psychological orientations toward an objectively existing world. I shall emphasize how interpersonal communication of feeling is especially important for individuals' experience of connectedness with others, and suggest that vision plays a special but not indispensable role in enabling young children to discover the fact that different people have different attitudes and points of view vis-à-vis a shared environment that includes the children themselves.

My second concern is with young children's developing capacity to symbolize. To symbolize is to treat one thing in such a way that it stands for another. This statement is a crude oversimplification, but let that be.