The Other in Perception by Susan Bredlau

Author:Susan Bredlau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Pairing and Trust

I have argued that all of these empirical studies support the phenomenological idea that the child’s experience of her caregiver is primarily a matter of “pairing”; that is, the child perceives her caregiver as an “other.” The caregiver is not perceived simply as an object, but neither is her subjectivity a “problem”; instead, the child perceives the caregiver as another perceiver by collaborating with her perceptually. I want to make a further point about the essential affective dimension of this pairing, and to do this I will return to Stern’s studies of mutual gaze.

Stern’s understanding of mutual gaze finds support in Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s work on participatory sense-making. De Jaegher and Di Paolo define participatory sense-making as “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own.”60 De Jaegher and Di Paolo cite a case of mutual gaze described by Stern as an example of a particular kind of participatory sense-making in which “through coordination of sense-making, one of the interactors is oriented toward a novel domain of significance that was part of the sense-making activity of the other.”61 In this case, a mother repeats the phrase “I’m gonna getcha,” each time lengthening both the time it takes her to say the phrase and the time she pauses between the phrases. In doing so, Stern writes, “the caregiver progressively ‘stretches’ the interval of the anticipated beat and in doing so increases the degree of discrepancy from the expected and the infant’s excitement.”62 Likewise, De Jaegher and Di Paolo argue that the affect regulation described by Stern is possible because “the infant is oriented towards a change of affective state through his participation in coordination with the mother’s tempo.”63

Yet even as Stern and De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s discussions of mutual gaze reveal its essentially collaborative character, I think they overlook its emotional significance. Stern often describes the infant and her caregiver as equal partners in their interaction; he writes, for example, that “both partners can regulate the amount of effective stimulation impinging on the infant”64 and that “both mother and infant can readjust their behavior to bring the level temporarily back into an optimal range.”65 Likewise, De Jaegher and Di Paolo define social interaction as “the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents,”66 and they do not modify this definition when discussing interactions between a caregiver and infant.

I think, however, that while infants have a kind of autonomy, their autonomy is very different than that of adults. Infants can act spontaneously, and their activity can have an impact on their interactions with their caregivers; in this sense, infants are autonomous. Yet unlike adults, infants have little or no prior experience of either their own behavior or the behavior of others. They cannot, therefore, evaluate the meaning their behavior enacts in light of past interactions with other people. For example, an infant

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.