The “Single Consciousness-and-‘I’” of the Child at Different Ages

Introduction

Many people would intuitively agree that every human being lives her whole life long in something like her own “consciousness-and-‘I’.” In the third of a series of papers “Consciousness in the study of human life and experience” (here abbreviated as “Consc. I”-“Consc. V”), Witz and Goodwin (2012) take this as a starting point for the conceptualization of the “phenomenon/experienced reality” that a person essentially feels herself to be “a single consciousness-and-‘I’ from childhood to old age” and present the latter as a basis for a new way of understanding a person, her consciousness, society, and beyond. The “single consciousness-and-‘I’” has been elaborated further in Consc. IV and Consc. V (Witz & Brown, in press; Witz & Lee, 2013), but mostly only on the basis of how it appears in the portraits of young adults and adults (exemplified in dissertations such as Goodwin, 1999; Lee, 2006, and in the portraits of university students in Witz, 2007b). However if the “single consciousness-and-‘I’” is to represent really a new way of understanding a human being, then a person’s single consciousness-and-“I” as an adult has to “go back,” as a “single consciousness-and-‘I’” so to speak, to the person’s childhood, to age 1½ years when the child is beginning to speak, and actually to early infancy. Obviously, this does not mean that anything like the kind of consciousness and the kind of sense of “I” a person has as an adult goes back to these ages. The phenomenon/experienced reality of the “single consciousness-and-‘I’” was described as the authors saw it in their qualitative research, in their participants, in their own and their students’ research projects, and in themselves (in their own experience in their own life). And it was described using terms (concepts) of common discourse that are commonly used in describing adults’ experience in daily life (such as consciousness, awareness, and feeling). But the very title of their article leaves no doubt as to the intent. Implicit in the whole approach of conceiving of the individual as a “single consciousness-and-‘I’” is that the “consciousness-and-‘I’ entity” that the investigator sees in the adult participant, and of which she eventually gives a particular (partial) image, a larger impression in a portrait in the context of her particular research topic—that entity, that consciousness, that “subjectively being,” that “consciously being, existing” goes back to ages 6, 4, 2, 1½ years, indeed in some sense to infancy and immediately after birth. That is, every person can say that “the single consciousness-and-‘I’” or the “me subjectively being” that I am now as an adult—that consciousness and that “me being” existed already in some form when my family and my society say I was 6 years old, . . . , 1½ years old, and even when I was a neonate.

The present article consists of two parts, separated by a brief look at the relevant literature. Part 1 (Sections 1-3) develops the thesis that at every age level the child is already a “single consciousness-and-‘I’” with characteristics analogous to those evoked in the last three Consciousness papers in the case of adults, and these forms of the “single consciousness-and-‘I’” transition naturally into the “the single consciousness-and-‘I’” found when the child has become an adult. Then, after a brief look at research on children and child development (Section 4), Part 2 (Section 5) discusses how one can go about actually getting a sense of aspects of the single consciousness-and-“I” of a particular child at early age levels.

Section 1: Foreshadowing the Future Person. There are three features of the single consciousness-and-“I” of a person when she is an adult that have analogues at earlier ages when she is still a child. First (Section 1), there is a major principle that is presupposed in portraiture in general (painted portraits of individuals and portraiture in the sense of Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, 1997; cf. 2 in Figure 1, Consc. V), and which my students and I see in every adult in our practice of Essentialist Portraiture with adults. This is the “(overall) unity of the person,” her “unity”—“the way she is inside and from the outside” and “the way she sees things”—in a particular time period (say in her senior year in college) as well as her “(overall) unity across time” (from teenage years to old age). It is ultimately this unity or oneness that enables the portrait to be “a testimony of who the person is” and a “testimony to what the person can/will become in the future” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), or that enables it, as we will say, to “foreshadow” something of what she does become in the future. Obviously, his “unity, almost oneness” is part of the very nature of a human being and one would expect to find this nature also at earlier age levels, not just in adults and young adults. The single consciousness-and-“I” is only the unity or oneness in the person’s subjective being, and that is part of the overall unity of the person as a whole (part of her subjective way of being inside combined with the more external aspects of her, her personality, emotional nature, abilities). Hence, one would expect to find that kind of nature of the person, that aspect of actually foreshadowing, also at earlier age levels. ¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Transcript for question (“theme”) A3.

Section 2: Evolving (forming, deepening, ramifying) and distillation of the single “single consciousness-and-‘I’” in a constant process of “I-feeling” and “self-feeling.” In an adult there is going on all the time during the day a sea of “I-feeling” and “self-feeling” of unimaginable proportions and diversity (see Consc. V, Section 3). A second fundamental aspect of the conception of the “single consciousness-and-‘I’” is the fact that a person’s consciousness (more precisely her consciousness-and-“I”) continually evolves in this sea of constant “I-feeling” and “self-feeling” further (there forms in her continually new self-understanding, there arise in her continually new attitudes) and is continually molded-distilled into the “single consciousness-and-‘I’.” Section 2 suggests that something like this constant going on of “I-feeling” and “self-feeling” is likewise part of human nature and is found at every age, not only when one is a young adult or an older adult. So again one would also expect almost constant analogous diverse “feelings” at earlier age levels which, in the course of time, would become what we would normally call “I-feelings” and “self-feelings” in teenagers and adults. At the level of adults, one can become aware of these in oneself and one can intuit similar things to be going on in one’s friends. The challenge to qualitative research is for the investigator to get a sense of these as they exist at earlier ages in childhood also and to communicate this to the reader.

Section 3: Taking for granted that one is always the same person. Finally, there is the fact that, at the level of an adult, one takes for granted in innumerable ways that when one does things, thinks, experiences, one is always the same person. One feels that one lives continually with one’s familiar consciousness and with one’s own familiar “I,” in touch with how one came to be what one is now, and so forth from childhood on and in all domains of life. Based on my experience (see Sections 4 and 5), I would say that this aspect of taking for granted that oneself is one and is “always the same person” is found in some form at last down to age 1½ years (I did not study younger children). There is no doubt in my mind that it is possible for us to develop more detailed understanding of the subjective being of child along all three lines of Sections 1 to 3.

Section 4: While the oneness of the child already as a neonate is never questioned, there is in mainstream research on children and in the child development literature very little engagement with the points discussed in the preceding sections. Indeed, while “I” and “self” is a big topic, consciousness is not in the picture. Awareness and consciousness in the child at the neonate level, for example, is sometimes acknowledged, sometimes explicitly denied (e.g., Lewis, 1994), and never pursued for its own sake. There is little support for any serious attempt by an investigator to try to substantively understand the subjective condition of the child with her own consciousness. ²

In the vision of the individual as a single consciousness-and-“I,” the person starts out with feeling, awareness, consciousness already when she is a neonate, and one feels that from the sea of feelings and subjective life of the child at each age level there emerges a more definite person with a more definite self and “I” to go on to the next age level. The problem for qualitative research is to understand this whole vast incredible process—each sea of feeling and consciousness, and each emergence of a more definite self and “I”—in more detail. There is some research in child development that resonates to this, particularly Colwyn Trevarthen. In his research, Trevarthen constantly recognizes the infant’s consciousness and subjective feelings, her taking initiative in exploring, presenting herself, and so on (her “inter-subjectivity”), and his work points to numerous possible precursors of more developed ways of being a person which are seen in older children and adults. In this section and the next, I very much draw upon my own memories from the 1970s when I was deeply involved in micro-analysis of videotapes of children aged 1½ when they were just beginning to develop language, and of older children.

Section 5: This section finally discusses how it is possible to actually get a sense of an individual child’s single consciousness-and-“I.” Here, I first emphasize the approach of “portraying the way of being of an individual child,” because portraiture is to some extent able to address the nature of the individual person at many levels of wholeness, unity, oneness (in spite of all social science, the wholeness and unity, almost oneness of the human being has de facto remained a mystery). Second, to get a sense of the child’s subjective experience and state, one should micro-analyze extended continuous segments of audio- or video-recordings in which one can follow and maximally empathize with the many changes in subjective state that the child goes through in a period of several minutes. It is only by using the whole of oneself (body, mind, and spirit) as an amplifier that one becomes aware, by introspection in oneself, of the many diverse and constantly overlapping holistic nuances in these changes—feelings, movement contours, level of absorbedness, level of alertness, joy—that one can get a sense of the whole state, feeling, consciousness of the child. And actually, for that one also needs moral dedication such as Cooley’s “sympathetic introspection,” Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’s “focus on what is good” and “inner disciplines” as in Witz and Bae (2011).

1. Earlier Ways of Being “Foreshadow” Ways of Being in the Future

It is the unity or oneness of an adult as a person that foreshadows to some extent the way she will be in the future. Implicit in the conception of the single consciousness-and-“I” as it appears in adults is that if one has some understanding of the person as a whole at a given time, then this will foreshadow so to speak her state 5, 10, 20 years later. Or more briefly, earlier ways of being (“the person one is” at earlier ages) “foreshadow” the kind of person one becomes later. This is the thrust of Lawrence-Lightfoot testimony, at age 50, that the portrait of her that was painted when she was a young woman of 25 “is still a vital document of who I am (and who I may become) even if it no longer looks like me” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 4). The artist who painted the portrait was deeply engaged in trying to understand her when she was sitting for her for several weeks, and the portrait she painted at that time is recognizably related to how Lawrence-Lightfoot is now.

The aspect of being able to have some understanding of a person as a whole, of being able to express it in a painted or a written portrait, and the capacity of that portrait to foreshadow to some extent the person in the future, these three aspects together represent a basic characteristic of both human cognition and human consciousness. It refers not only to the “inner phenomena” in the painter and artistic dimensions implicit in portrait painting (in Western and several other major traditions ³ ) and literature but also to how human beings know each other. Thus, when David Goodwin in 2011 interviewed Beth, one of the teachers whom he had interviewed 14 years earlier for his dissertation, the person he describes in his 2011 interview (Goodwin, in preparation; Witz & Goodwin, 2012, Section 4, Excerpts 5-8, pp. 706-708) is undoubtedly the same as the Beth in his portrait in his dissertation (Goodwin, 1999). ⁴ And recognizing and describing her in 2011 as the same person as the person in the interviews and portrait more than 10 years earlier not only says something about the quality of his portraiture, but it also presupposes a common nature of understanding among him, the reader who reads and understands the new write-up, and Beth (cf. Consc. V, Section 2 end). Similarly, suppose I meet an old friend X with whom I had no contact for 15 years and we talk over coffee for an hour at an airport. Then after some time (several seconds, may be minutes or more), I will likely recognize in her “the same old X” whom I knew so well. Then, I will see some aspects that are very familiar—“that is the way he is,” but others will be new to me. Some of the latter might be expected considering the new circumstances that have arisen in her life since then, but others might be more unexpected. In any case, I will “update” the understanding I had of her in my consciousness-and-“I” accordingly. Again, this whole scenario says as much about how I know my friends as about how they “foreshadow” the way they will be in the future.

In Essentialist Portraiture, my students and I used to refer to the general principle involved in this as “the unity of the person (the participant that is being portrayed)” (Witz, 2006; Witz, Goodwin, Hart, & Thomas, 2001). When the portrait painter gets a single unified impression of the person, it is something of this unity or oneness in her that she recognizes. The painter gets a sense, a glimpse of that unity or oneness, and that glimpse enables her to further express, bring out, whatever, the particular overall impression she happens to bring out in the portrait. And some of that same unity or oneness is also recognized by the viewer when she looks at the portrait. The same is true for a good written portrait in the sense of Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997). The participant’s unity and oneness will not only reflect her whole history as a person, but represent something like a timeless aspect. In fact, the very fact that one can see something like an essence of a person reflects a certain unity or oneness of her as a person, irrespective of time. The participant is essentially one in her understanding of her self, of her past, and of how she came to be the person she is now as well as of the world as she knows it—she has a unified subjective understanding of everything. This aspect of her is her “consciousness-and-‘I’” at the time of the interviews (see Consc. III, Section 4). The written portrait gives a partial picture of this unity, the subjective side of the participant at the time of the interviews, but it also gives an idea of her as a whole—her subjective side combined with (or in harmony, in unity with) her more external ways of being (personality, abilities, intelligence).

Now clearly, this general conception of a person’s subjective nature being in unity with her more external ways of being and the combination being capable of foreshadowing how she will be in the future is a general understanding of human nature. One would expect to find the same kind of human nature also at earlier age levels, not only in young adults and adults. So to say that the single consciousness-and-“I” of the adult “goes back” to the early ages in childhood really means that at earlier ages there is a unity of body, feeling, consciousness, and subjective being that foreshadows the unity of body, feeling, consciousness, and subjective being that one sees when she becomes an adult. It is possible for a sympathetic investigator even in the case of a small child to get a sense of the kind of person the child is and that this kind of person can be recognized later when she is say 4, 6, 10, and in adulthood, just as it is for the mother (see Section 5). Obviously, the investigator herself has to be truly motivated and will have to “enlarge” herself, so that she will be able to “see” at the given age level and be able to articulate what she sees in words, similar to a portrait. Not many researchers look at a child at as deep and detailed a level, and with the concentration, sympathy, and objectivity, as the level at which Lawrence-Lightfoot’s portrait painter looked at Lawrence-Lightfoot when the latter was sitting for her for her portrait.

2. Going Through “I-Feelings” and “Self-Feelings” All Day Long at Different Ages in Childhood

In evoking the single consciousness-and-“I” with examples, Consc. III, IV, and V all appeal in various ways to the fact that in the individual’s experience, there are every day all day long innumerable moments, minutes, and so on of all kinds of conscious and semi-conscious “I-feelings” and “self-feelings.” All day long, there is “small (almost infinitesimal) modification, re-aligning, re-envisaging of things-and-me, of things-and-how-I-see-them” (Consc. IV, Section 2); every day one is endlessly engaged in “processes that serve to establish, confirm, affirm, re-affirm, and sustain that unity or oneness” of the consciousness-and-“I” that is one’s subjective life (Consc. V, Section 3). Whenever one has conversations with others, one is constantly engaged in how what is being talked about relates to oneself (one’s own experience, interests, social situation, self-image). When one is reading a book (fiction and to a lesser extent nonfiction), even though one may be caught up in whatever the book is projecting, one has constantly personal reactions to what one is reading, and these reactions play a part in evolving one’s self-understanding. In all these cases, there is a huge variability. These “I-feelings” may be very fleeting or they may be extremely powerful absorbing, they may be experienced semi-consciously as if in passing or with full consciousness and so on. However, they are all concerned with how what one is taking in at the time is connected with oneself or with “I” and in that sense they are all “I-feelings” and “self-feelings.” In the case of an adult, living throughout the day in a sea of such feelings, reactions, and thoughts is part of the normal way she evolves and develops in life.

Now, it is clear that the unity of the single consciousness-and-“I” of the adult in a given period of time (say “the way she was in her first semester of college” or “the way she has been in the last twenty years”) “reflects” this constant going on of “I-feelings” and “self-feelings.” ⁵ Indeed, in this constant sea of “I-feeling” and “self-feeling” there is a constant evolving (forming, deepening, ramifying, distillation) of the current consciousness-and-I into the “single consciousness-and-‘I’ that lasts until old age,” which involves hysteresis (constant transformation that represents “memory”) of astronomical proportions and mostly unknown dimensions. But again, this whole picture obviously holds not only for adults, it describes “general human nature,” and something analogous holds also for the child at a given age. The child will evolve and develop as a person even in the early years in the same way. There will be going on in her, and she will be part of, a constant sea of analogous feelings in some way connected with “self” and “I,” analogous to the “I-feelings” and “self-feelings” in an adult, except that we (qualitative researchers) have never tried to get a sense of what these analogues at a particular age are like. Obviously, these analogous “feelings” will take different forms at different age levels and may also be very different in different individual children. But at each age level, they would be part of maintaining and further developing the child’s presuppositions and explicit, intuitive perceptions of herself, and self-understandings just as this is the case with adults. In fact, there is evidence that these kinds of things are already going on in the neonate, see Section 4.

3. The Child in Her Consciousness Implicitly Presupposes She Is Always a Single and the Same Person

This brings us to the third, the most powerful and least understood aspect of the “single consciousness-and-‘I’.” An adult typically takes for granted that she is “a single continuous consciousness,” living continuously in the world of her feelings, conceptions, knowledge, in the world of her awareness and consciousness, and that this world is a single world—a single oneness—across all domains. This is connected with the fact that, as an adult, she takes for granted that she is the same conscious person all day long, in this period of her life, and in fact has been the same person her whole life long, although at the same time she may be also very aware that there have been times where she was not so unified, that there have been major changes in her over the years (“I am not the same kind of person anymore that I used to be”), she may want to forget (and actually does forget) some of the things in her past, and so on.

But is all this not also “human nature,” is it not true that these kinds of things can be seen, and that one could get some sense of what forms these kinds of things take in the child at earlier ages? It is incredible to see a little person only 1 year old, still walking only by planting her feet one at a time, walk into the large open spaces in a restaurant or a department store, looking around as if all of that world belonged to her. Maybe she has her head cocked up 20° or 40° as if she was taking in that world of the big adults. Or maybe she is now focusing now on this and now on that at her own height. “Infants are born with a bold self-consciousness of this kind, one that soon takes responsibility for independent acting and thinking” (Trevarthen, 2005, p. 56). As the child grows up, every year brings new inner knowledge in her world in unity with new behavior. When she grows up in a reasonable stable family, she can always be seen to be very much herself. The challenge for qualitative research is to enter into these kinds of things.

4. Literature on Children and Their Development

In the research literature on children and their development (as opposed to biography and semi-popular nonfiction books by parents about their children), there is little concern with the realities of subjective experience discussed in the last three sections. Almost all mainstream research on children below age 2 or 3 (the “scientific study of the child”) is strictly in terms of observable behavior. The great majority of work with children before age 3 or 4 is completely in the service of theoretical questions of memory, possible connections with neural structures and activity in the brain, general ideas about the self (“I” and “me”) and things like the child recognizing herself in a mirror and the emergence of language (which represent behavioral milestones). ⁶ Thus, Howe, Courage, and Edison (2003) begin their argument in their review of literature with the observation that “despite the ongoing definitional debate, theorists from diverse perspectives . . . (from Darwin to Mead and Piaget) agree on at least one important issue”:

Excerpt 1. . . . the self has at least two fundamental though interrelated facets. Specifically the “I,” a subjective or implicit sense of the self as a thinker, knower, and causal agent, and the “me,” an objective or explicit sense of the self with unique and recognizable features and characteristics that constitute one’s self concept. (p. 473)

“Until relatively recently,” they continue, “empirical investigation of the self in infancy was focused almost exclusively on the objective or explicit self (i.e., the ‘me’)” (p. 473), something that “occurs unambiguously at about 18 months of age” (p. 474). But, they argue, the latter is “linked to achievements in a number of domains including object permanence, altruism, empathy and self-evaluation, synchronic imitation, the language ‘explosion’ and pretend play” (pp. 474-475). The “achievement of this ‘critical mass’ of awareness of, and knowledge about, the self that comes on line at about 18 months of age” (p. 475) the authors call the “cognitive self.” This cognitive self then makes possible the “autobiographical self” that gets developed using memories of one’s own personal experiences, “things I witness(ed), things that happen(ed) to me” (p. 471).

Although all this is insightful and in certain contexts no doubt useful, the cognitive and autobiographical self are only postulated by the theorist on the basis of introspecting, based on what she sees in behaviors and theoretical issues in her own experience as an adult. There is very little concern with trying to subjectively understand (with her own consciousness) the larger subjective state and consciousness of an individual child, there is virtually no attempt to try get an idea of the consciousness of a particular child the way one has an idea of the subjective side of an adult one knows, particularly a friend. Researchers may differ on what memory certain behaviors or certain responses in a certain task indicate and on whether by these behaviors and responses the cognitive self has been established. But the general mode is always on the basis of postulated conceptions with postulated “objective” correlates. ⁷ It is true that there is in this literature some agreement that there exists already in the neonate a “subjective or implicit sense of self-awareness,” called “the subjective self,” which would therefore overlap with what Sections 1 to 3 above envision as the consciousness-and-“I” of the child at that age. But that is dismissed.

Excerpt 2. The subjective self originates in neonatal, perceptual, motor and social process, includes self-regulation and self-other differentiation, and affects and direct much of our behavior. However, as it is not a conscious, mental state, it does not require a “me.” Moreover, although this subjective self does provide a foundation for the objective self, it is not replaced by it in ontogeny, rather the two continue to co-exist. (Howe et al., 2003, p. 475)

In other words, the “subjective self” in the neonate is not “a conscious mental state,” it does not fit this postulated concept, and “therefore” “does not show evidence of a conception of ‘me’,” two more postulated theoretical points. And although as envisaged this “subjective self” is explicitly acknowledged to provide a “foundation” for the objective self and the autobiographical self postulated by the theorist, and to even continue as a separate aspect in the child (presumably as some sort of structuring) into later years and adulthood, there is no effort to investigate and check these subjective aspects, not to mention effort to understand the child as a whole more directly subjectively, as she appears to oneself and to the family members when they interact with her.

“Active inter-subjectivity in infancy” (C. Trevarthen): In the early 1970s, I was for several years deeply absorbed in micro-analysis of videotapes of children aged 1½ to 2 and 4. There was absolutely no question in my mind that the child before me was feeling, had awareness, was conscious, and was already a very definite (particular) unified person in a sea of constant subjective feelings and being just like older kids and adults. I imagine many parents feel the same way. One strand in the literature that resonates with this point of view and the ideas in Sections 1 to 3 is much of the work of Colwyn Trevarthen (1998, 2005) and his collaborators on infants. A related voice is that of Daniel Stern (1985). Trevarthen (1998) summarizes the history of his own and other’s research and ideas under the general heading of “infant inter-subjectivity.” That is, the infant shows already soon after birth an extraordinary subjective life with inter-subjective overtones, and that unfolds and ramifies into numerous aspects in the first year of life. This inter-subjectivity is “innate” in the sense that it is not learned and can be seen almost immediately after birth (without assuming that it is “produced by brain functioning”). The “foundation” of his own work, says Trevarthen (1998), was “recognition [around 1968] of the coherent intentionality and active consciousness of the infant at birth” (p. 12, italics in the original). Ever since, he has been one of the few serious investigators who has no qualms talking about the child being a conscious being even at the level of a neonate. ⁸ I believe that the bulk of his now 40+ years of work provides seminal observations and conceptualizations that could easily be pursued further as part of developing the vision of the evolution of the single consciousness-and-“I” in the first 2 or 3 years. However, Trevarthen himself seems committed to regarding brain functioning as the basis of consciousness. Consc. I-V and the conception of the “single consciousness-and-‘I’” represent an effort to understand consciousness in human life and experience in a way that does not make this assumption.

5. Methodology for Getting Glimpses of the Consciousness-and-“I” of Children

In this section, I briefly sketch an approach to getting a beginning intuitive understanding—at least a glimpse—of a child’s current state and what she is experiencing, assuming one has some detailed data available, a very detailed transcript or—ideally—an audio- or video-recording. I first describe the approach in general terms (1-5), then illustrate in a particular case using the recent study by Jegatheesan and Witz (2014), and then add one more general point (6).

Examples using Jegatheesan and Witz (2014): Before we go on and add a sixth point, we illustrate the preceding points with examples drawn from the study of a 7-year-old Muslim girl, Waheeda. The data for the study came from a large interview project of Dr. Jegatheesan’s with 90 children aged 6 to 12 as participants. The aim of the project was to study the children’s personal relationships with pets that they currently had or that they used to have at home. The children belonged to six cultural groups (each group consisting of 15 children), all of them living in the Pacific Northwest, such as Muslim American, Japanese American, Latino American, and so on. Waheeda belonged to the Muslim American group, which consisted entirely of children who had been recruited from a particular Montessori school that also taught Arabic and Koran. The aim of the project was not to compare across the six different cultures, but instead to get an in-depth understanding of children and their pets in each cultural group. Children were interviewed individually for 40 to 60 min each. For the interview, Dr. Jegatheesan had developed a fixed set of 20 short questions and used the draw and tell technique. The questions covered a range of topics, such as basic “information questions” (e.g., “What are [your pet’s] favorite toys, favorite foods?”). “feelings” (of pet and child, for example, “Does your pet have feelings, and what kind of feelings?”), pet–child “communication” (“How do YOU understand what YOUR pet is trying to say to you?”), and others. The questions were printed in small booklet with a plenty of space underneath each question, and while investigator and child were talking, the child drew (and maybe wrote) underneath the question things connected to what they were talking about. This format provided an environment that was perceived by the child as new but still natural, a setting in which she could be herself and talk about things as she was experiencing them (see 2 above).

Normally, audio-recording, and with very small children, video-recording is almost a must. The study on Waheeda (Jegatheesan & Witz, 2014) is anomalous, in that it is based not on the original recording but on a very detailed transcript of the original recording, see below (the latter had to be destroyed due to Institutional Review Board [IRB] regulations). The paper deals with the analyses of two segments from the interview, one from the early portions of the interview and the other from after more than halfway through the interview, in Sections 3 and 4 of the paper, respectively. I give some examples from the analysis of the segment in Section 3 dealing with relatively factual information regarding the pet. The segment was chosen after Dr. Jegatheesan and I got some good intuitive understanding of some aspects of Waheeda’s subjective experience, consciousness, and state in the first half of the transcript and realized that that differed significantly from what would be comparable adult experience. In terms of the portrait painting analogy, the painter or portraitist first has to see something of larger interest before she can paint a portrait that expresses what she sees; we first had to see something, something significant and arresting in the transcript, and then focus on a segment that we thought would give the reader a sense of what we thought we were seeing.

To give some concrete examples, consider the first piece of the segment in Jegathheesan and Witz, Section 3, where Brinda goes on to the third question in the booklet, A3: “What are [the pet’s] favorite toys” (Figure 1, same as Jegatheesan and Witz, 2014, Figure 3). Dr. Jegatheesan’s actual transcript starts a new line whenever there is a very slight new element in what is being said (see 3(a) and (b)) and runs to well over 1,000 lines. For intelligibility, Figure 1 groups lines into larger units that can be considered as representing turn taking) and numbers these units for reference (rather than the original lines). Individual lines within these units are then referred by a, b, c, and so on. For brevity, Figure 1 also omits lines with Brinda’s constant comments (being interested, or wondering “really” or “how?”) unless they are directly relevant in connection with Waheeda’s behavior, as well as lines where Waheeda is dealing with practicalities of drawing and writing (like asking for crayons).

Recall that the core of the approach is to try follow in detail the how and why of the many overlapping changes in subjective state that the child goes through in the given segment, starting with small changes. Even in a small piece of transcript like that in Figure 1, this quickly becomes an absorbing enterprise. In 61, she first repeats the main point of Brinda’s question [58], “her favorite toys,” 61a, as if she was setting up starting point for her thinking. Then, it looks like she responds to that, 61b “I remember once she played with some kind of thing.” Because of the period at the end, this seems to be a full and complete response, completely self-contained. But then there seems to come a new thought, a memory, 61c “But I think once she played with one of my toys,” with a new element, “one of my toys,” which modifies 61b and represents a more specific response to 61a and 58, amounting to a refinement of 61b. And stimulated by Brinda’s 62a and 62b, she elaborates 61c further, 63a “sometimes,” 63b “she played with my toys.” Apparently, she is going over in her mind what Brinda was asking, with 63a affirming her question, and 63a-b representing a still more specific response to the original 61a and 58.

But then, very unusual, the preceding kind of “tentative step-by-step going further” continues even further, in spite of Brinda’s 64 “Okay.” Waheeda changes her mind: 65a “You know, I actually, don’t even remember her playing with my toys yet.” And then a further comment with a further new element: 65b “Any toys.” In other words,

Excerpt 3. . . . she corrects 63 to she doesn’t remember Izzy playing with her toys, 65a, and then corrects that further to she doesn’t remember her playing with any toys. (Jegatheesan & Witz, 2014, p. 86)

The whole series [58]-61-65b is unusual, one cannot help feeling that there is actually something fairly specific and important going on. There is a sequence of discrete steps, Waheeda is making a sequence of distinct points, each point contains a new element compared with the previous point, typically the new point is always prompted directly by something, either her own previous activity or point or Brinda’s constant talking. One unexpected aspect is that the changes and the individual points are small and coming slowly. Indeed, she is thinking back and remembering a time when she was only five. It is as if she is engaged in dealing with memories and ideas and feelings and trying to see them as a larger coherent, internally consistent whole.

Obviously, the preceding paragraphs illustrate 3(a)-(b) above to “understand (‘feel’) (a) every new feeling, every new feeling or sudden impulse in the child and (b) anything new [the child] initiates or brings up”: One notices new elements that the child introduces, 3(b), and “feels” that she is responding to comments of Brinda’s or to her own previous verbalization. They also illustrate attention to “how something is being said,” 4(b) above, and feeling (emotion) and diverse expressions in voice,” 4(c), as the “tone” in which something is being said and expression in voice are still to some extent recognizable from the verbatim wording. When one becomes aware of how Waheeda reacts to these smaller elements and changes, one naturally becomes aware of and tries interpret the “longer (several seconds or longer) overall aspect, state of mind, whatever” that is involved, 3(c), which represents, as 4 says, a “larger intelligible subjective state or condition that occupies longer time levels.” Indeed, returning to Figure 1, to see the character of, and to be able to get a sense of a possible subjective meaning of, a series of “modifications and “expansions” like the one from [58] to 65 is a first step in exploring and developing an image of larger subjective as well as objective aspects and phenomena that might be involved in it. After Excerpt 3, Jegatheesan and Witz immediately note that at 67 there starts in several respects similar series.

Excerpt 4. Then at 67 comes a new thought or memory (may be a feeling plus a thought or image) which she then pursues: 67-[68]-69 (she confirms 67)-71 (she expands 67, 69). . . . (Jegatheesan & Witz, 2014, p. 86)

In fact, similar series occur constantly throughout the whole interview. For example, the next portion of the transcript, the conversation sparked by the next question in the booklet, “What were her favorite Foods,” 83-123 (Jegatheesan & Witz, submitted, Figure 4), “illustrates virtually all the phenomena already seen in the previous segment,” 58-82. Here is the authors’ first intimation of what Waheeda may be experiencing:

Excerpt 5. Stepping back a little, one gets the distinct impression that Waheeda is “working in her own mental space,” so to speak, single-mindedly trying to come to a single larger conscious understanding of both Brinda’s overall question A3 and of how she remembers Izzy. It is as if she is trying to get a larger conscious comprehension—she is in constant contact with Brinda, addressing the questions she is asking, she reacts to every little bit of Brinda’s reactions ([okay], or [question tone—“really?”]) and other expressions (nudges for more detail), and the series of expansions all seem to end up with a single larger conscious comprehension that has “all the details in proper place.” At the same time this quest for larger conscious comprehension involves examining possibilities: she sometimes changes her mind and comes to a new different overall state, etc. (The usual expression “she is trying to sort things out” does not fit; there is no evidence she is working with pre-existing abstract categories which is typically involved in “sorting things out”) (Jegatheesan & Witz, 2014, p. 86)

It is clear that the preceding comments on Waheeda’s paper are only very specialized examples of the general approach 1 to 5 at the beginning of this section. Any serious attempt to understand the state of mind and subjective experience of a child using this approach will have its own character and is likely to be completely different.

Excerpt 5. The exchanges [72]-73 and [76]-77a suggest that all this further and further “expanding” is intrinsically integrated with her state of engagement with booklet (she has to complete what ever she is doing there before going on). (Jegatheesan & Witz, 2014, p. 86)

In general, a “unified whole” is something like a “holistic aspect” that is (a) represented by something specific that can be pointed out in the transcript or on the recording or film; that (b) “has its own coherence, unity”; and that (c) indicates to the investigator something that is subjectively meaningful to her and that she considers to be distinctly part of the subjective experience of the participant (child). In other words, the particular visible or audible aspect that the investigator sees or hears and that strikes her as a holistic aspect of expression and behavior has at this particular point in the segment (in this particular context) a certain meaning or certain connotations regarding the child’s subjective state, although at first the investigator does not know exactly what these are. And finally, when the investigator feels she does subjectively to some extent understand the unified whole she is seeing, there is an additional requirement. Namely, (d) if the putative unity or whole she “sees” or “hears” is pointed out to a third party investigator or other researcher, the latter agrees that yes, she can see or hear that feature or aspect on the recording also, and yes, that aspect might very well have this kind of meaning (it does suggest such and such an attitude, or such and such a feeling or state or type of subjective experience), but she (the third party investigator) is not sure it actually does so in the given situation. Similarly, the aspect has to be recognized by the reader when she reads it in a portrait (and in the case of an adult participant, by the participant herself).

Conclusion

Obviously, the whole approach to getting a sense of a child’s consciousness in particular contexts revolves around the investigator introspecting and contemplating what she feels and becomes aware of in herself. My experience has been that the post hoc process 1 to 6 in the last section of “coming to see things” and expressing them in a portrait is the result of devoted investigating, with constant concentration, any discernible unities one sees in the totality of what is coming from the participant (see Consc. II). As mentioned in the Introduction, real seeing of realities in the child’s experience and developing an insightful portrait are based on “sympathetic introspection” and involve true concern for the child and for meaning in the child’s life. These kinds of things are only possible when the investigator imposes strict inner disciplines on herself (Witz, 2008; Witz & Bae, 2011). With such dedication, the investigator can develop beginning intuitive understanding of some of the subjective being of the child that can be shared with fellow investigators and readers.

The individual points 2 to 6 in the last section all point to the fact that what we are calling “unified holistic aspects” or “unities” involve meaning and subjective experience or consciousness that is “part of” the “Larger Mind” in which the investigator, the participant, and the reader take part (see Consc. IV, Section 3). For all three of them, experience them with some common meaning, awareness. In fact, it is because of the latter that one feels one is beginning to understand some of the state or experience of the subject (adult participant or child or infant).