We can’t see our selves

People can’t see themselves. Our eyes are in our sockets and unless we have a mirror we see outwards, not inwards. Just like with our physical bodies we require a mirror to bounce the light off our skin, onto the mirror and back to our eyes in order to see ourselves, so also with our selves we require relational mirrors to reflect back to us a vision of our selves. Just like with a physical mirror any distortions, imperfections, smudges, or flaws will impact the image we see reflected back to us, so also everything we use to view our selves through relationship with will impact the reflected self that we see mirrored back to us and given the sticky nature of our selves may in fact become part of our selves.

Self consciousness

Self-consciousness is something that develops together with the self in the process of development.

We just added an adorable puppy to the family named Mookie. The first night Mookie was in the house he saw his reflection in a sliding door and immediately growled and barked at it. We of course thought it was adorable. “What a silly dog that doesn’t understand that it’s seeing its own reflection in the glass.”

We don’t think about why Mookie can’t recognize his own reflection. Mookie isn’t self-conscious. Mookie doesn’t mind walking around naked, having its bodily functions in plain sight or doing anything at all wherever it wants. Mookie is in this way like a human infant or a very small child.

You may not know this but infants can’t recognize themselves in the mirror. Psychologists study this and believe that a child becomes self-conscious around the time that they begin to recognize themselves in a mirror. This is also probably around the same time that they begin to develop a conscious self and begin to create a self sufficient to collect consciously retrievable memories and begin to construct the story line that we associate with our lives. The child has become a self the child itself can recognize and begin the lifelong task of relating, mirroring, associating, constructing, evaluating, and participating at a whole new level to the broader, social and cultural story of humanity. This small being already at a very young age will be a culture maker and will already start to contribute to something much larger than her self, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves in our own story here, back to the child.

When I lived in a tropical climate and my children were very small we would let them run around naked. They loved it. Like Mookie they simply lived freely, without hot and restrictive clothing, they peed and pooped wherever and whenever they felt like it. It was Eden.

At some point, of course, they began to realize they were naked. Then they started to cover themselves up, close their bedroom door when they were changing. They became self conscious. From that point on the world was not the same. Their conscious interactions with the world didn’t just involve the world, even though all the while they were unconsciously developing a reflected sense of self, they were not self conscious actors or characters in their stories. They were certainly selves and actors in my story, but they didn’t at that point have a storyline within their own heads that they played within. After developing a conscious self they would reach back and appropriate the self that they were, but could not know at that time in their development into their selves, but prior to the capacity for maintaining a conscious self they couldn’t host it.

Multiple selves once again

This of course brings us back to a question we faced in the introduction. Are we one self or are we multiple selves? There is the self that others see, complete with the necessary accoutrements and filters of identity, and there is the self that we see ourselves as being and the imagined true self that we imagine and very much desire to have, to be, to know and to see.

Before we know our own selves there is the self that our parents and others around us know. There is something there as any parent can attest to. That body is simply not yet capable of hosting its own self. That self is not only dependent upon its body and its brain as critical medium of its own self, but it is dependent upon a group of observers and other selves within its relational network. It is a self, distinct and identifiable in itself, but it is also dependent upon a web of selves in relationship with itself to exist. Those relationships are defining it, helping construct it as it constructs its own self while that cloud of selves carries it along until it can grow up and develop enough to be a much larger actor in the development of its own self along with the broader story and culture that the larger group is creating.

Glimpses of a larger world

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, but I do want us to pause and note how selves require observers and relaters to create additional selves and the broader work of selves which is culture.

We will soon get into discussions about selves, the physical world are a part of, the world that is the host for our relational world, and the ways that our selves bring them together, but we should note how our selves bend time, space and existence by the work that they do.

Before a child can host a self that self exists and is sewn into a web of selves and of culture that will imprint not only the coming relational world but also the coming physical world. Just as a child’s mother hosts that child before that child’s body is ready to face the world more independently, so also the parents and relational network around that child host that child’s self until the self is prepared to be a self at a more independent level. The parents and relational network around the child help construct that child’s self, providing to it a world of assumptions, morals, norms, that will become as much a part of that child as the DNA within the body, much of it unconsciously all the while shaping that future self.

We should note that this process involves a certain amount of transcending time. While the conscious self will very much travel through time in the way we all experience, that self exists hosted by others selves in its relational world around it before that self knows itself to exist. A shadow, reflection and disembodied self will in fact continue to exist after its physical host is no longer able to support it. As a pastor I hear people talk this way all the time. “He’s not gone, he’s still in my heart.” Again, we’ll take a closer look at this later.

We should note that past selves continue to exist in a diminished form even when the self in time has changed. Parents fondly remember their pre-self-conscious children even after the child has developed a conscious self. Loved ones of Alzheimer’s victims desire the self that the body is now both changing and in real terms destroying.

These selves are all real to us even if no longer hosted or in development, diminished but still a part of the broader relational network and project of culture making. As long as there is someone or something to host the memory, record or consequence of a self, that self in some for endures. The hosting of selves is very flexible in that way, and as we will see later, this is something that should give us hope. Time and the ravages of decay may not necessarily govern all things, but we have a lot more work to do before we explore the question of multiple stories further. For now we should note that while selves travel through time, they are themselves not completely subject to it.