Table Of ContentDEVELOPMENTAL
APPROACHES
TO THE SELF
PATH IN PSYCHOLOGY
Published in Cooperation with Publications for the
Advancement of Theory and History in Psychology (PATH)
Series Editors:
David Bakan, York University
John Broughton, Teachers College, Columbia University
Miriam Lewin, Manhattanville College
Robert Rieber, John Jay College, CUNY, and Columbia University
Howard Gruber, Rutgers University
WILHELM WUNDT AND THE MAKING OF A SCIENTIFIC
PSYCHOLOGY
Edited by R. W. Rieber
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY: Concepts and Criticisms
Edited by Joseph R. Royce and Leendert P. Mos
PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
Edited by Benjamin Lee
DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES TO THE SELF
Edited by Benjamin Lee and Gil G. Noam
DEVELOPMENTAL
APPROACHES
TO THE SELF
Edited by
Benjamin Lee
Center for Psycizosocia/ Studies
Chimgo, Illinois
and
Gil G. Noam
McLe111l Hospitl1/l1lld Hl1rul1rd Medim/ SciIOO/
The CiilliCil/-Ocz'e/Ol'lIlf11tl1/ illstitute
Be/lIlOlIt, Mil55ilChll5fffs
With the collaboration of
Kathleen Smith
PLENUM PRESS • NEW YORK AND LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title.
Developmental approaches to the self.
(PATH in psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Self-Congresses. 2. Developmental psychology-Congresses. I. Lee, Benjamin.
II. Noam, Gil C. .III. Center for Psychosocial Studies. IV. Title. V. Series.
BF697.C576 1979a 155.2' 5 82-22582
ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-3616-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-3614-3
001: 10.1007/978-1-4613-3614-3
© 1983 Plenum Press, New York
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1983
A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation
233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the following people for making
this volume possible: Kathleen Smith, Lynn Clark, and Janine
Poronsky for their efforts at coordination between Chicago
and Cambridge and the demands of the two editors; Alexandra
Hewer, Laura Rogers, Robert Kegan, Ann Fleck Henderson,
Sharon Parks, Anne Colby, Steven Rolfe, and Paul Goldmuntz
at the Clinical Developmental Institute in Belmont, MA. for
their intellectual support; the colleagues at the Adolescent
and Family Development Project of Harvard Medical School,
Stuart Hauser, Allen Jacobson, and Sally Powers for their
continued research input to our attempts to empirically in
vestigate some of the concepts presented here; Maryanne
Wolf, Larry Kohlberg, and Barney Weissbourd for being pa
tient and critical listeners to the many versions of these
papers.
v
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
The Concept of Self: an Operational Definition 7
M.F. Basch
Steps Toward a Hodel of the Self • . . . 59
G.G. Noam, L. Kohlberg, and J. Snarey
Sensorimotor Egocentrism, Social Interaction, and
the Development of Self and Gesture . . 143
W. van de Voort
The Self and Cognition: the Roles of the Self in
the Acquisition of Knowledge, and the Role
of Cognition in the Development of the Self 189
A. Blasi
The Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Adolescent
Self and Identity 215
J.H. Broughton
A Neo-Piagetian Approach to Object Relations 267
R. Kegan
Towards a Vygotskian Theory of the Self 309
B. Lee, J.V. Wertsch, and A. Stone
Language, Thought, and Self in Vygotsky's
Developmental Theory . • . . . . . 343
B. Lee and H. Hickmann
Contributors 379
Name Index 381
Subject Index 387
vii
INTRODUCTION
Each of the three great schools of developmental psy
chology represented in this vo1ume--psychoana1ytic, cogni
tive-developmental, and Vygotskian--diverges in important
ways. But more recent changes in each discipline have led
to new possibilities for theoretical integrations. Each ori
entation has begun to focus upon the problem of "meaning
construction", that is, how a person's subjectivity and con
sciousness is created through his interaction with signifi
cant others. Each discipline also discovered that as it
switched to meaning and interpretation as the foci of their
work, they had to reformulate and, in some cases, reject po
sitions taken by their founding figures. The papers in this
volume attempt to describe the newest developments in each
of these fields and to foster a theoretical dialogue around
the concept of the self. The papers in this book emerged out
of discussions at a Conference on the Self, sponsored by the
Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago.
For the psychoanalytic and cognitive-developmental ap
proaches, we can observe a transition from what we call the
bio10gism of both traditional Freudian and Piagetian memta
psychologies to a more "communicative-interactionist" point
of view. Psychoanalysts have focused on the subjective expe
rience of their patients as constituting a reality in its
own right, and therefore have always focused upon problems
of communication and interpretation. But Freud's emphasis on
bio-sexua1 development led him to create a metapsycho1ogy in
which the basic organizing principle is that of drive re
duction. He viewed meaning as largely a means to further
biologically based psychic needs and conflicts, and this is
reflected in his treatment of language. The major function
of language is to represent reality (as opposed to communi
cation), and it is distortions in this function that forces
one to look for unconscious motivations. If more complicated
forms of thought arise through the structure of communica
tion, it is only a short step to posit that more complicated
affective and motivational processes are created and struc-
2 B. LEE AND G. G. NOAM
tured by communicative principles, rather than seeing mean
ing as only a transparent means for the expression of
affect.
This strong emphasis on bio-sexual development led to a
metapsychology which underestimated the importance of the
structure of meaning and communication in the development of
an experience-organizing ego and self. The ego, confronted
with powerful libidinal impulses, was attributed the place
of the "weak rider of the strong horse". American ego psy
chologists tried to overcome these theoretical shortcomings
by introducing the concept of an autonomous and conflict
free sphere of ego functioning. They--and that is also true
for Erikson--still remained wedded to a tripartite model of
the mind in which the ego develops out of an initial ego-id
matrix and is confronted by superego demands and id forces.
However, Erikson and the proponents of British object rela
tions psychology shifted the emphasis to psychosocial and
interpersonal aspects of development. Heinz Kohut's work
adds to these attempts at reformulation by introducing the
concepts of self and self objects as the constructors of an
overarching unity of subjective experience. He insisted
that empathic introspection and interpretation in the
clinical ("transferential") situation is the data generating
base of all of psychoanalysis, and is inherently communica
tive. Although still very controversial, Kohut's theory
links a developmental theory of social interaction with a
hermeneutic approach to subjectivity, relegating Freud's
bio-sexual drive theory to a secondary position. Michael
Basch's paper in this volume discusses basic themes in Heinz
Kohut's theory of the self. It integrates psychoanalytic
approaches with recent research in both the Vygotskian and
Piagetian paradigms. Starting with infancy, he traces how
affect and cognition are mediated through the development of
more complicated systems of communication into which the
child is socialized and analyzes how the therapist makes use
of these commmunication patterns in the process of psycho
therapy itself. Basch concludes by arguing that the inte
gration of psychoanalytic, Piagetian, and Vygotskian ap
proaches provides the foundation for an operational defini
tion of the self.
The cognitive developmental papers share with the psy
choanalytic ones a turning away from the referential-nomin
alism of their founding figure, Jean Piaget, to a more com
municative interactionist approach. Most of Piaget's work
INTRODUCTION 3
was concerned with the child's cognitive development in his
interactions with physical objects, "mute" things. It became
almost immediately apparent to later researchers that the
cognitive structures developed in such interactions would
not be adequate to deal with the child's communicative in
teractions with other agents. Kohlberg's theory of moral de
velopment advanced our understanding of social development
and gave impetus to the field of social cognition. Theoret
ical formulations and empirical investigations have proven
very successful and inspired a new generation of psychologi
cal research with a focus on the self, relationships between
cognition and affect, and clinical orientations. Consequent
ly, there has been a revival of interest in the theories of
Mead and Baldwin who both maintain that self and other
emerge only through social interactions that are essentially
communicative.
The paper written by Noam, Kohlberg, and Snarey ana
lyzes functional and structural theories of the self and
proposes steps toward an integrated model of the self. These
principles build on Eriksonian and social-cognitive the
ories. Embedded in this approach are new ways of studying
the the relationship between cognition and affect, identity
and biography, and new concepts of clinical integration
centered around a life-span theory of the development of the
self.
Werner van der Voort's paper demonstrates that there is
a hidden social dimension to even the sensorimotor period of
the child's development of object concepts. Through a fine
grained reanalysis of Piaget's own data, he shows that the
first "Piagetian permanent object" is the hands of others,
thus rooting even object development to social interaction.
Blasi argues for the importance of the self in creating
any coherent epistemology. The critical inight is that any
such epistemology must include a subject who makes judgments
and differentially directs his attention to the world. The
self becomes a process, not merely a self-regulating system
of cognitions.
John Broughton presents a social cognitive perspective
on the development of the self and identity during adoles
cence. He reviews the relevant work of Piaget, Koh£berg, and
Erikson, and then points out their theoretical and empirical
inadequacies in dealing with identity formation. His conclu-
4 B. LEE AND G. G. NOAM
sion is that an adequate psychology of development must,
ironically, go beyond psychology and view the self as trying
to forge an identity in the crucible of the history of it
self and the society in which it is embedded.
Robert Kegan, in "A Neo-Piagetian Approach to Object
Relations", builds on Piaget and Kohlberg and presents a de
velopmental theory of self and object relations across the
life cycle. Each stage of self and other is a new form of
"meaning-making", a new construction of the subject's rela
tions to significant others and to the self. His chapter is
a statement of a social cognitive approach to the self as
following an underlying developmental logic of self-other
differentiations.
The last two papers are departures from both psychoana
lytic and Piagetian concepts. Vygotsky clearly begins with
a social systemic account of the origin of the "higher men
tal functions". In both the Kohutian and cognitive-develop
mental approaches, the structuring principles of psychologi
cal development lie in dyadic interactions involving two or
more agents. This switch is a clear advance from the
biological principles of Freudian drive reduction and the
Piagetian analogies organic assimilation and accomodation
and evolutionism. Vygotsky, however, insists that the high
er mental functions arise through the child's differentiat
ing different levels of a social institution, namely lan
guage, and that the principles which govern the structure
and development of language (or for that matter, any social
institution) are never reducible to either biological prin
ciples or principles of dyadic interactions. Vygotsky be
lieved that ultimately psychological development followed
dialectical principles which were derived neither from biol
ogy or social psychology, but from the interactions of
social institutions over history. Language, being a social
institution, is also subject to these laws, and, as the
child uses language, he begins to transform his psychologi
cal processes along dialectical lines. The last two papers
in this volume, introduce these Vygotskian themes and sug
gest ways in which they intersect with psychoanalytic and
cognitive-developmental psychology.
In very important ways, a dialogue between these theory
traditions will help advance a general developmental theory
of consciousness. Vygotsky never developed a theory of the
self or psychic conflict, while psychoanalytic theory is
