I have
always appreciated Daniel Stern’s writing. It is open, honest, and explores its
targets systematically. Hence, also the problems in the analysis of mental
phenomena stand out clearly. The brief extract in my previous post sent me back
to Stern’s “The motherhood constellation” (1995). In the first five chapters of
the book a theory of parent- infant interaction is outlined in cognitive terms.
It is a masterpiece of showing where the problems of representationism reside.
I quote:
Our model insists that maternal representations
can influence the observable maternal behavior with the baby; that is, they can
be enacted. What would serve as evidence that an effective transformation from
a mental model to concrete acts has occurred?
We must be able to describe in concrete
behavioral terms how the mother manages to be rejecting and aloof such that her
rejection and aloofness can be perceived by the baby and have an impact on him.
Can “rejecting” be translated into behaviors such as breaking mutual gaze, putting
the baby down when he still wants to be in her arms, or refusing to pick him up
when so solicited. Can “aloof” be translated into behaviors such as selectively
ignoring some of the infant’s vocal signals or being unable o smile until the
baby has done so? (Stern. 1995. The motherhood constellation, pp. 41-42)
…there is a puzzle close at hand: how to
conceive of continuity of theme or meaning in the passage from a mother’s
representation to her overt interactive
behavior, and then from the infant’s experience of that behavior to his
construction of his own representational world. The issue becomes, what are the
rules of transformation across these domains. But the question remains. Can we chase a
phenomenon into and out of several domains or levels of description and across
the borders of different minds and at the end of the chase be sure we are still
following the same phenomenon? Let us
begin such a chase anyway. (Stern, 1995 pp. 42-43)
Stern
indeed performed the chase and demonstrated how complex the phenomenon appears
to become when it reaches the final transformation, that is, the procedures by
which the infant makes sense of the parent’s interactive behavior. I will spare
my comments to the next post.
