Summary
This chapter begins with a recapitulation of the author’s approach to rethinking the model of the human individual implicit in Rational
Emotive Behaviour Therapy, using some of the core concepts of
Freudianism to provide a structure. Next, the text returns to
Freud’s writings to review some of those concepts, and in particular to challenge Feud’s view of human sexuality. The result is a more general view of power relations between children and parents, and emotional difficulties arising out of those conflicts, rather than through psychosexual stages of development.
The text then reviews the theory and perspective of the Object
Relations school of psychology/psychotherapy. This psychodynamic orientation sees relationship as being central to what life is about.
It is not an optional extra. Human babies are ‘born to relate’.
Relationship is integral to the survival urges and survival strategies of humans. The CENT perspective sees the relationship of motherbaby as a dialectical one of mutual influence, in which the baby is
‘colonized’ by the mother/carer, and enrolled over time into the mother/carer’s culture, including language and beliefs, scripts, stories, etc. This dialectic is one between the innate urges of the baby and the cultural and innate behaviours of the mother. The overlap between mother and baby gives rise to the ‘ego space’ in which the identity and habits of the baby take shape. And in that ego space, a self identity appears as an emergent phenomenon, based on our felt sense of being a body (the core self) and also on our conscious and non-conscious stories about who we are and where we have been, who has related to us, and how: (the autobiographical self).
Section 5 explores the question ‘Who am I?’ and in the process structures a model of what a human individual seems to be. And
Section 6 examines the nature of good and evil, as innate and socially constructed aspects of each individual, including supporting evidence for this perspective in the literature of different religions and cultures.
This is followed by a brief review of the philosophy and psychology of human development, from Plato, though Kant, to Piaget, Bruner and Vygotsky; and back to Freud and the Object Relations theorists.
Section 9 reviews the way in which Transaction Analysis can be used to conceptualize the internalization of the mother and father by the baby’s mind. And, finally, Section 10 explores how the

(conscious and non-conscious) mind emerges from the complexity of internalized relationship experience.
~~~
1. Introduction
Somewhere around the beginning of 2009, I was working on the development of a set of models that were taking shape as the core of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT). I had reviewed my earlier work, from 2003, on the complex A>B>C model and was still unhappy with the way the "individual" shows up in my models as isolated and separate from others. (See the models in Chapter 2, above).
I had begun with the Stimulus-Organism-Response model, and then built up a model of the A>B>Cs which included overlapping cognitions and emotions at point B in that model, as follows:
Figure 1 - A complex A>B>C model
In this model, the beliefs are assumed to be in the head of an individual. However, in Figure 3 of Chapter 2, above, I did say that the Activating Stimulus (A1) is "socially agreed". Nevertheless, how this social agreement comes into effect, or gets represented at point

B in the model – as part of the ‘individual’s belief system’ - was not discussed in that chapter.
Much later in that chapter, I went on to present a model which takes account of the body of the individual, as follows, but still no real social dimension. This linking of the body and mind echoes the arguments in Damasio (2000) 1 .
Figure 2: The A>B>C Model Related to the Y-Model
Figure 2 shows a weight lifter, thinking-feeling-behaving in relation to his task. This image suggests that, when something happens at
A1, it is interpreted at A2 (not shown), which triggers cognitiveemotive processing of the A2 signal at B (1, 2 and 3). At the same time, the B1 (unconscious cognitive-emotive processing) sends a signal to the Y-model (visceral, facial, physiological arousal), which responds by sending a signal to the C1 (not shown) where it combines with the output from B, and together these signals produce the emotional-behavioural response at C. As it stands this could seem to be a fairly straight restatement of the James-Lange theory of emotion. (Kagan and Segal, 1992, pages 321-322).
However, this still shows no connection of the individual to the social background from which s/he sprang; although it does show his/her current connection to his/her environment (via the A1, or
1
Damasio, A.R. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.

Activating Stimulus), which in this case is assumed to be external.
(Sometimes the Activating Stimulus is internal: a memory from the past; or an anticipation of some future event).
I had lived my own life - at least up to the age of thirty, and a little beyond - as an (emotionally) isolated individual who did not understand relationship - or so it seemed to my analyst and me
(back in 1968) - and yet I now (1980 onwards) knew from Zen philosophy that every "thing" is just a small distinction within
"everything". In other words, Zen sees the individual as being
distinguished from, but not separate from, everything else.
There is only one "life" and it is all of a piece. So why did my psychological models show "separate individuals"?
I had written to Dr Albert Ellis (probably around summer 2000) to say that, because REBT did not have a personality theory, I normally used Transactional Analysis (TA) when trying to understand the personality structure of my clients. TA postulates that we each have a number of ego states (or cognitive/ emotive/
behavioural states), primarily the Parent, Adult and Child ego states; and that our current thinking, feeling and behaviour is determined by whichever ego state we are ‘occupying' (or ‘acting from') at any particular point in time 2 . However, I still could not quite see how the TA Ego State model could be incorporated into the A>B>C> model of REBT; and I kept returning to that challenge from time to time. (This will be described in detail in Section 7 below).
2. Back to Freud
Somewhere around Easter 2009, I returned to reading some of
Freud's papers to see if I might find some clues there. See in particular Freud (1940 [1938]) 3 , and his papers in Gay (1995) 4 .
2
In TA theory, we assume that, at any moment in time, an individual will be thinking, feeling and acting just like s/he once did as a child (Child ego state); or thinking, feeling and acting like some parent figure from his/her past (Parent ego state); or coolly calculating the pros and cons of her current reality (Adult ego state). See
Stewart and Joines (1987) – (Stewart, I. and Joines, V. (1987) TA Today: A new introduction to Transactional Analysis. Nottingham and Chapel Hill: Lifespace
Publishing.)
3 Freud, S. (1940 [1938]) An outline of psychoanalysis. In: Sigmund Freud (1993)
Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. The Penguin Freud Library,
Vol.15. London: Penguin Books.
4
Gay, P. (ed) (1995) The Freud Reader. London: Vintage Books.

Freud's model of the psyche, or mind of the human, has three essential parts:
1. The "it", or the physical/psychic baby, just as it is born, with no cultural experience. This was translated as "the id" by his English translators. (The "it" is not a "who", which it will eventually generate through cultural experience).
2. The "I", or "ego", which begins to emerge from the id when the baby is a few months old, as a result of social contact with the mother (or mother substitute). (Cf: Gay, 1995: 724-725).
3. The "over-I", or "superego", which emerges because the ego internalizes social rules and expectations. The superego is the seat of the conscience, and also includes the self ideal, or "what I should become or be".
Here is how Freud imagined those three elements of the psyche to be interrelated. (This model originates in Freud, 1933) 5 .
Figure 3: Freud's model of the psyche
5
Freud, S. (1933) ‘The Anatomy of the Mental Personality': A lecture. In: New
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis . Hogarth Press. Available online at: http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2007/11/ . Accessed: 18 th
December 2009.

In this model, the id is shown to be unconscious, which is an unfortunate term that I find quite confusing. We normally think of somebody who has been knocked out as being "unconscious". And by that we mean, incapable of functioning as a normal human
agent. However, what Freud meant by the "unconscious" was actually "non-conscious processing"; in so far as it was possible to reach that conclusion in his era 6 . That is to say, a part of our mind processes information in ways that help us to adapt and adjust to external reality - the ‘adaptive unconscious' - without any conscious awareness arising within us that this processing is occurring. (See
Gladwell, 2006 - below - for further elaboration of this concept of
‘adaptive unconscious'). When Freud proposed the "unconscious mind", he was derided by philosophers, who considered any mental processing to be necessarily conscious. (Freud, 1995:19) 7 .
However, there is much modern evidence for the existence of non-
conscious information processing, as an essential explanation for human functioning. (Cf: Bargh and Chartrand, 1999 8 ; Gladwell,
2006 9 ; Gray, 2003 10 ; Maier, 1931 11 ; and Haidt, 2006 12 ). I explored that evidence in my doctoral thesis 13 , and summarized much of the
6
What he actually said and wrote was this: "The oldest and best meaning of the word
'unconscious' is the descriptive one; we call 'unconscious' any mental process the existence of which we are obliged to assume - because, for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects but of which we are not directly aware." (Freud, 1933: available online, as above).
7
Freud, S. (1995a) An autobiographical study. In: Peter Gay (ed) The Freud Reader.
London: Vintage Books.
8
Bargh, J.A. and Chartrand, T.L. (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being.
American Psychologist, 54(7): 462-479.
9
Gladwell, M. (2006) BLINK: The power of thinking without thinking. London:
Penguin Books.
10 Gray, J. (2003) Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. London:
Granta Books.
11
Maier, N.R.F. (1931) Reasoning in Humans: II - The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 12: 181-194.
12
Haidt, J. (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science. London: William Heinemann.
13 Byrne, J.W. (2008) Teaching and Learning Ethical Research Competence in
Qualitative Research: An Action Research Inquiry: A thesis submitted to the
University of Manchester for the degree of Professional Doctorate in Counselling in the Faculty of Humanities. Manchester: School of Education, University of
Manchester. Available online: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id205.html
.

results in Byrne (2009e) 14 , and Chapter 9 above. Here is a brief summary of the main point of Byrne (2009e):
I argued that humans are both conscious (a small amount of the time) and non-conscious (about 95% of the time), and this is unavoidable because of the strictly limited ‘bandwidth of conscious processing’, which restricts us to about one millionth of the data we daily use (non-consciously) to survive. (Gray, 2003: 66) So my research respondents - and my CENT clients - are probably unconscious (meaning nonconscious processors of information) for at least 95% of the time, including most of the time they are interacting with me.
Returning to Freud's model of the psyche, above, we can see that the ego straddles the unconscious, the pre-conscious and the conscious. The conscious is what we are aware of, and the preconscious is what we can readily become aware of. There is also a division on the right of the model which represents material which has been repressed out of conscious awareness, into unavailable unconscious material.
On the left hand side of Figure 3 we see the division called the super-ego (or over-I), which is the internalized moral codes of the parents and significant others, and the models of an ideal self which are both taken over from parents and others, and self constructed.
Although this model does contain this internalized social influence, the model still feels and looks like a model of an isolated individual, cut off from the world.
The next model I want to consider is a more detailed version of
Freud's original model. It's normally referred to as the ‘iceberg model':
14
Byrne, J. (2009e) The status of autobiographical narratives and stories in CENT.
CENT Paper No.5. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for CENT Studies. Available online: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id167.html
.

Figure 4: The iceberg model (By Anthony A. Walsh) 15
This version of the model provides more detail than Figure 3, above. The super-ego is shown as the ‘social component' of the individual. The ego is labelled as the ‘psychological component'.
And the id is shown as the ‘biological component'.
Freud had begun by seeing the id as biological, and all of its fragmentary developments, including ego and super-ego components, as being driven by biological urges or drives.
In theory, Freud's model could have been developed to inquire into how the socialization processes in general resulted in a particular kind of ego development; how tensions could build up between the three components of the model from many sources to do with power, distorted perceptions, maladjustment of relational factors between parents and their children; and so on. However, Freud narrowed his focus down to one phenomenon: the sexual history, and especially sexual maladjustments. This is how he announced his conclusion:
15
Walsh, A.A. (2009) The influences on surrealism. Available online at: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/freuds_model.jpg
. Accessed: 18 th
December 2009.

"I now learned from my rapidly increasing experience that it was not any kind of emotional excitation that was in action behind the phenomena of neurosis but habitual ones of a sexual nature, whether it was a current sexual conflict or the effect of earlier sexual experiences": (Freud, 1995) 16 . He then went back and reexamined his earlier patients records and concluded that: "I was ... led into regarding the neuroses as being without exception disturbances of the sexual function, the so-called ‘actual neuroses' being the direct toxic expression of such disturbances and the psychoneuroses their mental expression. My medical conscience felt pleased at my having arrived at this conclusion". (ibid, page
15).
This seems to me to be an overgeneralization of the most extreme kind. There are so many things, of a nonsexual nature, that can go wrong in the power relations between children and their parents, and children and their peers, that it is unthinkable that such malfunctions play no part in the development of emotional disturbances - all of which have already been accounted for by one source of disturbance - sexual experience. There is no doubt that sexual experiences of an unnatural or distressing nature must be
one of the sources of human disturbance; but only one. And I have no doubt that frustrations of the affectional/amorous and loveseeking urges of the child will often result in emotional disturbances.
Annoyingly, Freud goes on to redefine sexuality in a way that makes it virtually non-sexual - unconnected with the genitals, and incorporating "...all of those affectionate and merely friendly impulses" which we normally call love - which must thereafter logically include virtually all normal positive human motivations within his concept of sexuality. If sexuality is thus defined (by
Freud) as the virtual sum of positive human motivations - (plus a bit of the negative ones) - then sexuality becomes almost the only potential source of human disturbance; because sexuality has come to subsume almost everything that is characteristically human.
When Freud and (some) Freudians then say that all human disturbance is linked to sexuality, what they apparently mean is that all human disturbance arises out of their human urges to cathect (or grasp) elements of their world/environment. Or, slightly more generally, all human emotional disturbance is caused by being human and interacting in human ways with other humans. This explains nothing!
16 Freud, S. (1995a) An autobiographical study. In: Peter Gay (ed) The Freud
Reader. London: Vintage Books. Page 14.

Among Freud's followers there were some who could not go along with his psychosexual overgeneralization, and who wanted to take a more general view of human disturbance. Carl Gustav Jung and
Alfred Adler were amongst them. This is how Freud describes their deviations from his scheme:
"Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the importance of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex as well as the necessity for an analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psycho-analysis: he entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men's desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiorities, and threw all of the discoveries of psycho-analysis to the winds". (Freud,
1995, page 33).
I have to say that I agree with much of what is said by Jung and
Adler; and I am convinced that, though sensuality and a desire for love - and even the desire to ‘possess the mother', in a non-genital way - seems to be central to the motivations of all infants and toddlers 17 , the idea that every child experiences a full blown
Oedipus Complex seems like a gross overgeneralization. Power relations of a more general nature within the family seem to me to be a much more fruitful domain to investigate than sexual desire
per se. And this is the domain of the Object Relations school of post-Freudians.
(However, this sense of the centrality of relationship also seems to be broadly accepted by modern Freudians, as indicated by Storr
[2001: 38] 18 , when he says that: "Where Freud was wrong was in making psychosexual development so central that all other forms of social and emotional development were conceived as being derived from it. ... Today, most students of childhood development regard sexual development as only one link in the chain, not as a prime cause. Difficulties in interpersonal relationships may be derived from early insecurities which have nothing to do with sex, but which can cause later sexual problems..." Here, Storr betrays his overinfluence by Freud by omitting to say "and those early difficulties
17
Mahler, M.S., Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975/1987) The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant: Symbiosis and individuation. London: Maresfield Library.
18 Storr, A. (2001) Freud: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Page 38-39.

may also cause later non-sexual problems; and that most neurosis probably has little to do with sex per se!" Of course, we still have to accept that actual difficulties in the sexual development of an individual "...may cause subsequent social problems" 19 , which is a million miles from Freud's formulation.)
3. Object Relations
Throughout most of his career, Freud had emphasized the objective, biological nature of the psyche, or mind, and its innate urges or drives. However, towards the end of his life, he began to acknowledge the subjectivism of mind states, the role of experience in shaping the mind, and the importance of relationships between people/minds and the equal importance of relations between the elements or components of the mind. According to Gomez (1997:
3) 20 , "...the Oedipus Complex with its interpersonal structure, and the super-ego as an internalization of the parent, demonstrate the addition of a relational perspective to his earlier view that emotional development was based on endogenous (or purely internal) processes".
He also began to place more emphasis on the ego than on the id, and to look at splits in the ego. However, his awareness of splits in the ego goes back to at least 1909, when he presented his series of five lectures at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts. In his first lecture he said: "The study of hypnotic phenomena has accustomed us to what was at first a bewildering realization that in one and the same individual there can be several mental groupings, which can remain more or less independent of one another, which can know nothing of one another, and which can alternate with one another in their hold upon consciousness". (Page 43: Freud, S.
[1962] Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books). This insight about splits in the ego had to await the arrival of Dr Eric Berne, in the 1940s and 50s for its full flowering into Transactional Analysis. (Games People Play, 1968) 21 .
Melanie Klein was the first major developer of this social relationship strand within Freud, but, given that she was not a scientist or medically trained, she developed a more subjective formulation of power relations in families than Freud could accept,
19
Storr (2001, page 39).
20 Gomez, L. (1997) An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association
Books.
21
Berne, E. (1968) Games People Play: the psychology of human relationships.
London: Penguin Books.

and so he rejected her as yet another deviationist. Indeed, Klein's theory of ‘subject relations' between mother and child was so intuitive, so colourful and fanciful, that it could not be sustained in the longer term, for she attributed to the new born child the capacity to think in terms of ‘good and bad breasts', exchanges between mother and infant of ‘faeces, milk, penises and babies' and so on. But she opened the door to a more thorough break with
Freud's atomizing of the individuals in a group into separated, as opposed to merely distinct, parts. (Gomez, 1997: 29-53). And she began a movement towards empathic understanding of the emotionally painful nature of infancy.
Around the same time as Klein, Ronald Fairbairn began to write about the dynamic structure of the self. Rather than being rejected by Freud, Fairbairn rejected Freud's scientific premises, and argued that "...the purpose of life (is) relationship rather than the gratification of instincts", and "he proposed a model of the mind which did away entirely with Freud's biological foundations".
(Gomez, 1997: 3). It might have been more helpful if he had concluded that our basic instincts seem to drive us towards relationship. (‘Something’ arrives with the baby; some innerdirectedness; some urges, appetites, drives – some emotional wiring).
When I first read that statement that the purpose of life is relationship, in Lavinia Gomez's (1997) book, I began to think more dialectically about the relationship between mother and child. I saw
Freud's biological bias, and Fairbairn's psychological bias as just that: biases. It suddenly seemed intuitively obvious to me that
‘individual humans' are both biological and psychological; and also that ‘individual humans' begin their lives as totally dependent ‘social products'. At that point, I began to rethink my models of mind.
This is what I came up with (as presented in Byrne, 2009f) 22 :
22
Byrne, J. (2009f) How to analyze autobiographical narratives in Cognitive Emotive
Narrative Therapy. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for CENT Studies. Available online: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id173.html
.

Figure 5: The most basic model of CENT - The dialectical nature of the individual/social ego. The ego is a product of relationship, and cannot exist without (external and/or internalized) relationship
The (normal, ‘good enough') mother has no real choice but to
‘colonize' the new born baby, as it is totally helpless; and she is wired up by nature to become attached to her children. She must
‘march in', take over, and run the baby's life for ‘it', otherwise
(unless it is colonized by a mother substitute) it will surely die. The neonate, or baby, is also wired up by evolutionary forces to ‘seek' a connection with what must seem (physically, emotionally) to be
"another part" of itself: thus creating a ‘natural symbiosis' which satisfies some innate needs of the baby, and some innate and socially shaped needs of the new mother. (The urge to seek a breast and suckle seems to be innate to all mammals). (Taylor,
1999 23 ; Gerhardt, 2004 24 ; Lewis, Amini and Lannon, 2001 25 ).
Over time, the mother and baby interact, in what initially what may seem like a very one-sided relationship, but increasingly, over
23
Taylor, D. (ed) (1999) Talking Cure: Mind and methof of the Tavistock Clinic.
London: Duckworth.
24 Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain.
London: Routledge.
25
Lewis, T., Amini, F. and Lannon, R. (2001) A General Theory of Love. New York:
Vintage Books

weeks and months, a mutual (largely symbolic from the baby's side
[e.g. turning towards the mothers voice, smiling]) giving and taking develops.
Figure 6(a): The mother interacts with the baby, and the baby interprets and encodes the experience in its embryonic ‘ego' space
Actually, from the very beginning of extra-uterine life, the baby and mother become locked together by facial communication from the emotional centres of their brains. This is called “limbic resonance” by Lewis, Amini and Lannon (2001) 26 . Figure 6(a) shows the earliest moments and hours of mother/baby interaction, in which the mother is the active agent while the baby encodes the experience of being held, fed, washed, dressed, kissed, cuddled, etc. Those events are the foundation of the socialized child. This is when and how we learn to feel, to interpret and manage our feelings and the interpretations of experiences. This is how the attachment style of the baby is established – secure or insecure 27 .
26 Lewis, T., Amini, F. and Lannon, R. (2001) A General Theory of Love. New York:
Vintage Books.
27
Wallin, D.J. (2007) Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York. The Guildford
Press. Pages 11-13.

One feminist writer, quoted in Gerhardt (2004) 28 describes the experience of suckling her young babies:
“The bad and the good moments are inseparable for me. I recall the times when, suckling each of my children, I saw his eyes open full to mine, and realized each of us was fastened to the other, not only by mouth and breast, but through our mutual gaze: the depth, calm, passion, of that dark blue, maturely focussed look”. (Page 16).
The mother and baby are engaged in a form of nonverbal communication, between the limbic system (or emotional centres) of the baby’s brain and the limbic system (plus prefrontal cortex areas that manage emotions) of the mother’s brain. Lewis, Amini and Lannon (2001) 29 show how the baby is reassured and comforted by real-time feedback from the mother’s face, even via linked video cameras. However, if a delay in introduced into the mother’s responses, the baby becomes distressed.
There is no doubt that, from the beginning of life, the baby and mother are involved in an active emotional relationship what the baby is wired up to seek out. This is what these authors call “limbic resonance”: “A mammal can detect the internal state of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match the situation – a change in turn sensed by the other, who likewise adjusts. While the neural responsivity of a reptile is an early, tiny note of emotion, mammals have a full-throated duet, a reciprocal interchange between two fluid, sensing, shifting brains”. (Lewis, Amini, and
Lannon, 2001: pages 62-64).
Later they say: “…emotionality forms a principal dimension of
(stored memories)… (A) particular emotion revives all memories of its prior instantiation. Every feeling (after the first) is a multilayered experience, only partly reflecting the present, sensory world”. (Page 130). In other words, our earliest emotional memories shape and colour the kind of subsequent emotional memories we can have!
Everywhere we go as humans, we engage in nonverbal communication with, and reading of emotion from, others in our environment. This process of limbic resonance is so silent and
28 Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain.
London: Routledge.
29
Lewis, T., Amini, F. and Lannon, R. (2001) A General Theory of Love. New York:
Vintage Books.

efficient that we hardly notice that it is happening. Nothing comparable happens from neocortex to neocortex. “…feelings are contagious while notions are not”. (Lewis et al, 2001, page 64).
And relationship is about mutual influence and shaping of the individual by its (or his/her) partner: “Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain’s open book. – In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our (Cumulative
Interpretative Emotional Patterns) activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. -
Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love”. (Lewis et al, 2001: page 144). And, of course, who we are, and who we become, depends upon who loves us, how much, and
how.
In the first four or five months of the new baby’s life, this relationship is apparently totally symbiotic, with the baby having no real sense of being a ‘separate being'. Around the fourth or fifth month, the baby begins to differentiate ‘itself' from ‘the other
(mother)': (Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975/1987, cited above) 30 .
When the baby gets past the symbiotic stage and becomes active, it
“…seeks out interaction with others, turns away from others when overwhelmed, freezes when he feels at risk; he already has the rudiments of emotion and self-regulation. Emotions are first and foremost our guides to action: they are about going towards things and going away from them”. (Gerhardt, 2004: page 33).
So from the very beginning, humans are social animals, and
Gerhardt (2004) says: “Human being are the most social of animals and are already distinctive in this way at birth, imitating a parent’s facial movements and orienting themselves to faces very early on”.
(Page 33).
However, I still could not quite see how the TA Ego State model could be incorporated into the A>B>C> model, and I kept returning to that challenge from time to time.
30
Mahler, M.S., Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975/1987) The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant: Symbiosis and individuation. London: Maresfield Library

Figure 6(b): The internalized relationship of mother and baby
When the experiences in Figure 6(a) are internalized in the baby's mind, over time, they are best characterized as intersecting id and superego, producing (cognitive-emotive) ‘ego experiences' in the
(green) dialectical space of interaction, as shown in Figure 6(b).
Those ego experiences, early on, are of emotion arousal, of satisfaction and dissatisfaction; comfort and discomfort; of being served by ‘a good mother’ or being thwarted by ‘a bad mother’.
(Gomez, 1997). The emotions are aroused in the limbic system, but it is my hypothesis that the memories are laid down in the neocortex, as part of the early learning of the individual baby – much of which, in the first year and more, is outside of language – preverbal, nonverbal, memories which some theorists calls ‘the abject’.
Something of this kind of model – of the primordial connection, based on emotional communication, between mother and baby - was what drove the thinking of theorists/practitioners like Winnicott and Bowlby, whose work with children in the UK in the 1950s and
1960s produced a revolution in social policy concerning the treatment of children in schools, hospitals and social welfare contexts. (Bowlby argued that it was the real relationship between mother and child, or child and carer, that determined the psychological state of the child, and not, as had been argued by
Melanie Klein, fantasies in the mind of the child). This new conception of how children and young people were affected by emotional relationships also fed into the campaign against mental asylums, and the development of relationships between individuals

with emotional wellbeing problems and their ‘key workers'. (Gomez,
1997: 5) 31 .
The idea that our earliest experiences are internalized as guiding patterns for future actions and interpretations is now widely agreed.
According to Gerhardt (2004: page 24):
“These unconsciously acquired, non-verbal patterns and expectations have been described by various writers in different ways. Daniel Stern (1985) 32 calls them representations of interactions that have been generalized
(RIGs). John Bowlby called them ‘internal working models’
(1969) 33 . Wilma Bucci called them ‘emotion schemas
(1997) 34 . Robert Clyman calls them ‘procedural memory’
(1991) 35 . Whatever particular theory is subscribed to, all agree that expectations of other people and how they will behave are inscribed in the brain outside conscious awareness, in the period of infancy, and that they underpin our behaviour in relationships throughout life. We are not aware of our own assumptions, but they are there, based on these earliest experiences”.
But let us now return to the statement by Fairbairn to which I referred earlier: Fairbairn rejected Freud's scientific premises, and argued that "...the purpose of life (is) relationship rather than the gratification of instincts", and "he proposed a model of the mind which did away entirely with Freud's biological foundations".
(Gomez, 1997: 3).
It eventually became obvious to me that this is black and white thinking, based on the Aristotelian urge to examine things in terms of either/or propositions. In fact, if you look at my two models in
Figures 5 and 6(a) above, you will see that they contain both the biological (id/neonate) and the social/relational (superego/mother).
31
Gomez, L. (1997) An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association
Books.
32
Stern, D. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.
33
Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment. London: Pelican.
34
Bucci, W. (1997) Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science. New York: Guildford
Press.
35
Clyman, R. (1991) The procedural organization of emotions. In: T. Shapiro and R.
Emde (eds) Affect, Psychoanalytic Perspectives. New York: International
Universities Press.

And it is in the interaction and intersection (or overlapping) of the instinct driven baby/id and the culturally shaped mother/ superego that the dialectical space for the emergence of the ego develops. Furthermore, it is the dialectical, self-constructing nature of that ego-space that makes the very foundations of the individual forever social (and biological)! (We carry internalized, cognitiveemotive, interpretative representations of aspects of mother [and - later - father] as symbolic experiences in our [electro-chemical, physical] heads forever, at non-conscious levels).
4. Internalizing Mother (and later, others)
Melanie Klein had argued that the new baby, over time, internalizes
‘parts' of the mother - e.g. the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ breast - and eventually ends up with a representation of the mother internalized as part of the basis of his/her ego. Fairbairn and others argued against this theory. In my view Fairbairn was wrong, and we are indeed strongly shaped by our earliest relationships. Gomez (1997:
53) supports this idea, when she says: "Klein's concept of the self built around the good object expresses her commitment to the primacy of relationship. The core of the self is the confluence 36 with another, underscoring our inescapably social nature".
Professor Douglas Hofstadter (2007) argues that a human ‘soul' - or essence, identity, consciousness or self - is basically a ‘strange loop' of self-awareness, viewed through categories and concepts.
(Hofstadter is Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, with a longstanding interest in modelling human consciousness.)
We are ‘feedback loops', in his theory, because we perceive our own
‘doings' and evaluate them. And we perceive others perceiving us, and relating to us, and this confirms our sense of ‘existing through experience'. This awareness changes our outputs/actions. Noticing our doings, or awareness of action; and noticing how others
(especially, in the beginning, mother and later father) relate to us, creates the illusion of being ‘the one who notices and who is noticed by others' - as opposed to ‘the brain/mind processes that notice; and the body that is noticed'. (Hofstadter, 2007: 207-208) 37 .
36
‘Confluence' means "the junction of two rivers", according to Soanes, C. (2002)
Paperback Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press. And two rivers intermingle when they meet, as do two humans who cohabit for long periods of time.
37 Hofstadter, D. (2007) I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.

Damasio (2000) 38 argues convincingly that our awareness of our internal body states is the referent for our ‘core consciousness’, or
‘core self’, and Hofstadter (2007) seems to be saying that it is our awareness of being observed, and observing ourselves being observed that makes us a strange loop of self-reflective consciousness, and generates our ‘elaborated self’ or our
‘autobiographical self’.
A newborn baby does not have a ‘self', because it has virtually no concepts or frames through which to capture a sense of its own existence. "What makes a strange loop appear in a brain and not in a video feedback system, then, is an ability - the ability to think - which is in effect, a one syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently large repertoire of triggerable symbols": (Hofstadter,
2007: 203). The newborn baby ‘exists', and it may be able to ‘feel' its existence, but it cannot yet ‘think' its existence, as it does not yet have any ability to think. However, babies do have a ‘fantastic
(genetic) repertoire' for developing ‘rich and powerful categorization equipment', in terms of ‘hardware' and ‘software': (Hofstadter,
2007, page 209). And furthermore, our earliest non-verbal emotive states form the very foundation of our later cognitive achievements, which will forever have an emotive dimension. That is the fundamental reality that cognitive science and cognitive psychology have ignored for decades, until very recently.
By about the fourth month of life, the child begins to develop a sense of itself as separate and apart from the mother. (Mahler, et al, 1975/1987). This is the beginning of ‘self consciousness’ or consciousness of the self – which depends upon the presence of an
‘other’ to act as a mirror, to reflect us back to ourselves. According to Armstrong (2003) 39 :
“In self-consciousness, we grasp (more or less accurately) 40 our personality as a whole; we think of ourselves as being a particular kind of person. These ‘perspectival’ and ‘holistic’ aspects of self-consciousness are the mental equivalent of the child looking in a mirror. But in this case the ‘mirror’ is made of other people (initially mother – JB). It is how one appears in the eyes and minds of others that comes back as the
38 Damasio, A.R. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.
39
Armstrong, J. (2003) Conditions of Love: the philosophy of intimacy. London:
Penguin Books.
40 “More or less accurately” here means “in realistic/defensible interpretation”.

material from which this crucial part of self-consciousness is constructed. So the child comes to feel lovable when it sees that its parents see it as lovable. The parents actions, tone of voice, way of looking, smiling, responding, become the reflective surface in which the child sees itself as lovable. Its own actions, gestures, feelings and words are taken up and given back by the parent. This complex kind of reflection, which transforms what it receives, is a crucial vehicle for the formation of self-consciousness; that is, for the child’s view of itself”. (Pages 57-58).
However, we need to be careful here, because, although selfconsciousness depends upon consciousness, the baby has in fact been non-consciously recording how it was non-verbally mirrored by its mother, probably beginning not much more than a few hours after birth. (Lewis et al. 2001). Thus, before there was a conscious sense of self, there was a non-conscious sense of self. (Damasio,
2000).
Hofstadter (page 210-212, and elsewhere) went on to explore the possibility that more than one ‘strange loop' 41 could exist in one brain. He used various thought experiments, including feedback between two video cameras that are trained on each other's output screens; the story of how he had internalized a version of his own wife's ‘self' over a period of decades; and other illustrations; and produced an interesting argument that, although we each develop our ‘core loop' of self-identity, we also internalize copies of parts of the loops that correspond to the identities of those to whom we are close relationally. He goes on to say:
"We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity (i.e., their own private strange loop) - and yet part of the private identity is made out of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the other individual. Furthermore, the more faithful the image of each screen (referring back to the video feedback experiment) on the other one, the more the ‘private' identities of the two loops are intertwined, and the more they start to be fused, blurred, and even, to coin a word, undisentanglable from the other". (Hofstadter, 2007, page 210).
41 At this precise point in this narrative, I am tempted to define a ‘strange loop’ as a spiral of action-reflection (in the eyes/mind of another)-action-reflection (as before)action-reflection- and so on. (Later I will conclude that perhaps a strange loop is of
Action-Experience-Personal.Change-Action-Experience-Personal.Change…)

This is a plausible and fascinating concept: the idea of two entangled lives, or braided lives. I struggled with this concept, and how to clarify it, for a long time before I found a clarification in
Damasio (2000). On pages 19 and 20, in a section titled ‘A search for self’, Damasio writes: “The way into a possible answer for the question on self came only after I began seeing the problem of consciousness in terms of two key players, the organism and the
object, and in terms of the relationships those players hold in the course of their natural interactions. The organism in question - (or the baby in our example: JB) - is that within which consciousness occurs; the object in question is any object that gets to be known in the consciousness process - (which in our example is the mother:
JB). Seen in this perspective, consciousness consists of constructing knowledge about two facts: that the organism is involved in relating to some object, and that the object in the relation causes a change in the organism”. (Damasio, 2000: pages
19-20).
This is how I have modelled that insight:
Figure 6(c): The strange loop of internalize experience

Figure 6(c) shows three successive moments of time – t1, t2 and t3. It also shows an organism whose initial condition is expressed by O +x : or Organism plus an unknown complex of experience (x).
That organism then relates to Object O +x : or (human) Object plus an unknown complex of experience (x). That Object ‘changes’ the
Organism which, at time t2 is now labelled Organism O +1 : or
Organism plus one changing experience. That organism, at time t2 relates to the same Object as before, and in the process the object again changes the organism at time t3 so that now it is labelled
Organism O +2 : or Organism plus two changing experiences. At time t3 this slightly changed organism once again relates to the same object, and again the Object changes the organism, so that it is now labelled… and on and on, iteratively, for as long as the relationship lasts. This interactional process involves internalizing a
‘strange loop’ of organism-relating-change-(modified object)relating-change-(further modified object)-relating-change-etc.
Let me briefly link this back to the earlier ‘mirror model’ presented by Armstrong (2003). Armstrong goes on to say: “We need the interpretative attention of another (person) to help us see ourselves in a more balanced way”. (Page 58). And more precisely, we need feedback from our culture in order to know how to grow into an acceptable member of that culture. And we somehow intuit that we had better change in line with their feedback to us; though sometimes we respond from Adapted/Rebellious child; sometimes from Little Professor; and sometimes from Nurturing or Critical
Parent.
Gerhardt (2004) also describes an aspect of this dialectical interaction: “Emotional life is largely a matter of co-ordinating ourselves with others, through participating in their states of mind and thereby predicting what they will do and say. When we pay close attention to someone else, the same neurons are activated in our own brain; babies who see happy behaviour have activated left frontal brains and babies who witness sad behaviour have activated right frontal brains (Davidson and Fox, 1982) 42 . This enables us to share each other’s experience to a certain extent. We can resonate to each other’s feelings. This enables a process of constant mutual influence, criss-crossing from one person to the other all the time.
Beatrice Beebe, an infant researcher and psychotherapist, has
42
Davidson, R. and Fox, N. (1992) Asymmetrical brain activity discriminates between positive v. negative affective stimuli in human infants. Science, 218: 1235-
1237.

described this as ‘I change you as you unfold and you change me as
I unfold’ (Beebe, 2002) 43 .” (Gerhard, page 31)
This, then, is how I conceive of “the internalization of the mother by the baby”. The baby acts and is reflected by the mother. The baby changes tack in response to this feedback. The baby is developing its own ‘strange loop', but at the same time it is completely entangled in the strange loop that is its mother. At the core of selfidentity is the identity of the mother. Later, bits of the father will also get added.
According to Gerhardt (2004) 44 : “The parent must also help the baby to become aware of his own feelings and this is done by holding up a virtual mirror to the baby, talking in babytalk and emphasising and exaggerating words and gestures so that the baby can realise that this is not mum and dad jut expressing themselves, this is them ‘showing’ me my feelings (Gergely and Watson,
1996) 45 . It is a kind of ‘psychofeedback’ which provides the introduction to a human culture in which we can interpret both our own and others’ feelings and thoughts (Fonagy, 2003) 46 . Parents bring the baby into this more sophisticated emotional world by identifying feelings and labelling them clearly. Usually this teaching happens quite unselfconsciously”. (Page 25). When this is done well, it results in a ‘secure attachment style’, in which the child grows up knowing how to manage their own emotions and those of their friends and, later, lovers.
If the parent is not sufficiently emotionally intelligent to be able to manage their own emotions, they will not do this job very well.
This will often result in the child developing a dysfunctional
‘attachment style’ which will come out in the future in the ways in which they relate to their eventual marriage or co-habitation partners.
43 Beeb, B. (2002) Unpublished talk at Bowlby Memorial Lecture. (But see instead
Beebe, B. and Lachmann, F. (2002) Infant Research and Adult Treatment. Hillsdale,
NJ: Analytic Press.)
44
Gerhardt, S. (2004)
Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain.
London: Routledge.
45
Gergely, G. and Watson, J. (1996) The social biofeedback theory of parental affectmirroring. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77: 1181-1212.
46
Fonagy, P. (2003) The development of psychopathology from infancy to adulthood: the mysterious unfolding of disturbance in time. Infant Mental health journal, 24(3):
212-239.

"At this point", says Hofstadter, "even though we are being guided solely by a very curious technological metaphor (of feedback in sound and video systems), I believe we are drawing slowly closer to an understanding of what genuine human identity is all about. In fact, how could anyone imagine that it would be possible to gain deep insight into the mystery of human identity without eventually running up against some sort of unfamiliar abstract structures (like
Freud's id, ego and super-ego)? ... Although my strange loops are obviously very different from Freud's notions, there is a certain similarity of spirit. Both views of what a self is involve abstract patterns that are extremely remote from the biological substrate they inhabit - so remote, in fact, that the specifics of the substrate would seem mostly irrelevant". (Hofstadter, 2007, pages 210-211).
If we think back to my two intersecting circles in Figures 6(a) and
6(b) above, we see the biological substrate as the id, and the
‘strange loop' of self emergence as the ego. The ego depends upon both the biological substrate (the id) and the cultural superstructure
(the super-ego); and the iterative interaction between them: organism-relating-object-change-(modified organism)-relatingetc….. My personality is inexplicable in terms of a mere expression of the kilogram of slimy grey matter in my skull. But it is equally inexplicable (at overt levels) in terms of the cultural patterns that I inherited from my parents - though I know much of that cultural underpinning supports the hybrid culture that I now carry at higher levels of mind.
Hofstadter continues: "At first I had proposed that a human ‘I' results from the existence of a very special strange loop in a human brain, but now we see that since we mirror many people inside our crania, there will be many loops of different sizes and degrees of complexity, so we have to refine our understanding. Part of the refinement hinges, as I just stated, on the fact that one of these loops in a given brain is privileged - mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain". (Page 212). All the other loops influence and control us indirectly, by influence, pressures, demands, prescriptions, codes, rules, rewards and penalties, and so on. Thus, though the mother does not directly control the thought processes of the baby, she does have a very powerful indirect control, as one tennis player indirectly controls the actions of their opponent by the ‘game' that they play. (Hofstadter, pages 212-213). But the mother has much more control than a tennis partner, because "Tennis ... does not give rise to deep interpenetration of souls. But things get more complicated when language enters the show. It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over the other humans' bodies (or actions) - a phenomenon very familiar not only

to parents and drill sergeants, but also to advertisers, political ‘spin doctors', and whiny, wheedling teen-agers": (Hofstadter, 2008. page 213).
Thus the mother wires up the brain of her baby, initially by handling and managing its body; and later by introducing the baby to her language, her linguistic culture, her rules, and her language-based world. But the baby also significantly wires itself up by the way it relates to, and is changed by, its ‘objects’ – mother, father, siblings, peers, teachers, relatives, neighbours, authors, TV characters, and on and on. But we must not forget that the baby is wired up with emotions, which determine how it feels about what its parents do or don’t do, and when it grows up and becomes a parent, it will be guided mainly by non-conscious cognitive-emotive patterns in how it ‘feels it should’ relate to its own babies. Thus emotion is central to all so-called ‘cognitive processing’.
More generally, as Alan Watts points out, "...the task of education is to make children fit to live in a society by persuading them to learn and accept its codes - the rules and conventions of communication whereby the society holds itself together". (Watts, 1990, page
25) 47 . And one of the rules in most western countries is that we must be brought to think of ourselves as quite separate, and isolated ‘individuals', with no overlaps; while in some eastern cultures, such as Japan, the social norm is to see the collective as primary, and the individual as part of a social collective.
All of this social conditioning goes on in the form of languaging, which interfaces with our emotions and feelings. In fact, language is for a human what water is for a fish: the invisible and unexperienced medium through which it swims. And, as Hofstadter points out: "Language plays a further role ... in this matter of establishing a body as the locus of an identity. Not only does it give us one name per body (‘Tarzan', ‘Jane') but it also gives us personal pronouns (‘me', ‘you') that do just as much as names do to reinforce the notion of a crystal-clear, sharp distinction between souls, associating one watertight soul to each body". (Hofstadter,
2008, page 214).
However, Hofstadter has presented a convincing case that substantial aspects of one person can live on in another person after the first person has died: that we are not as individual as we are persuaded by our culture. He goes on to say that "...no one should
47 Watts, A. (1962/1990) The Way of Zen. London: Arkana/Penguin. Pages 125-127, and 179-192.

have trouble with the idea that ‘the same hopes and dreams' can inhabit two different people's brains, especially when those two people live together for years and have, as a couple, engendered new entities (offspring – children – JB) on which these hopes and dreams are all centred". This was how he had felt about his wife,
Carol, before she died, tragically young. "The sharing of so much, particularly concerning our two children, aligned our souls in some intangible yet visceral manner, and in some dimensions of life turned us into a single unit that acted as a whole, much as a school of fish acts as a single-minded higher-level entity". (Page 224).
Why have I laboured this point so much? Because most people are sceptical about the ‘overlapping of individuals', and it is central to my argument that what is true of Professor Douglas Hofstadter and his wife is also, in its own way, true of every mother-baby dyad.
Two ‘loops' (of self-reflective feedback) come to exist inside each of them, and are carried inside for a lifetime: for better or worse!
Figure 7: The baby internalizes a representation of the overlapping interpenetration of its relations with its mother; and the mother internalizes a representation of her colonization of the baby
5. Koan Training and Model Building
Everywhere I went through the summer of 2009, I carried my pocket notebooks with me, and I found myself scribbling more and

more explorations of the intersecting circles that represent the interpenetration of the mother and baby - which is also the overlapping of the id and the superego - giving rise to the space in which the ego develops. This contradicts Freud's theorizing, in which the ego is present almost from the beginning, but the superego does not develop until much later. On the contrary, the basis of the superego is present from the beginning in the
colonization of the baby by the mother; and the ego develops slowly as the space of dialectical interaction between mother and baby fills up with cumulative, interpretative experiences.
At the same time, I felt the need for a new Zen ‘Koan', or
‘challenge'. Since 1980, I have practiced Zen meditation, which is a process of allowing languaging to die down in the mind, so we can experience reality directly 48 , in its ‘suchness', without evaluating it or commenting upon it: or at least minimizing our evaluations. This practice has been shown to reduce stress, and to permanently change the brain waves of practitioners to more relaxed states. In addition, I had in recent years adopted the Zen process of struggling with daily Koans, which are ‘challenging questions'.
49
(The best know Koan in the west is probably ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?') The origin of Koan training was the need for
Zen masters to develop a way to test the progress of their students, to see if they had achieved some movement on the road to
‘enlightenment' - or understanding of the nature of reality beyond linguistic labels.
50 I have been using Koan training for three or four years, and enjoy the mental discipline. And now here I was, drawing and redrawing my interlocking circles, and thinking: I must
begin a new Koan. So I went to my Runke (1998) box - (containing the book in the footnote below, plus a deck of cards containing Koan challenges) - removed the book; shuffled the deck of cards; and drew out a Koan card. It said: ‘Who are you?' Perfect.
Every day thereafter, as I left home, I began to ask myself the question: Who am I? Who am I?'; and tried to wear out the linguistic part of my mind which tries to produce intellectual
48
Insofar as that is humanly possible. This is, of course, limited, as we mainly ‘see’ with our experience, and not our eyes.
49
Ruhnke, A. (1998) The Zero Experience - Zen Koans. Dublin: Newleaf / Gill &
Macmillan Ltd.
50 Watts, A. (1962/1990) The Way of Zen. London: Arkana/Penguin. Pages 125-127, and 179-192.

answers, so I can get to the more intuitive part of my mind, which makes creative leaps and connects ideas wordlessly.
However, after a few days I had a realization. I should not be doing this as a Koan. I should be doing it as a human science enquiry; a piece of reasoning from what we already know (from the literature)
about the psychology of human nature and philosophy of mind. So
I began to construct a rational answer to my former Koan:
Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical organism.
That would satisfy the most extreme eliminative materialist.
Eliminative materialists are essentially ‘reductionists' who try to reduce all phenomena to their ‘physical essence'. An example would be the view adopted by Francis Crick, the co-creator of the double-helix theory of DNA, who "...concluded ... that ‘the self' is
‘no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules: a pack of neurons".
51 Although there is a grain of truth in this statement, it is as wrongheaded as listening to Mozart's Requiem and pronouncing: "That was nothing more that the squeaking of catgut on catgut; the plinking of wooden hammers on steel wires in a piano; the blowing of air through restricted holes in brass instruments; and so on". Most reasonable observers would reject this interpretation as inadequate to explain what is happening here! What Crick's interpretation eliminates is the whole social/ cultural/ emotional level of reality.
Rita Carter, writing about the conscious ‘I', takes us a step further forward with her view that:
"This essential ‘I' is so fundamental that it is impossible to imagine it away. Does it, though, have any more claim to be ‘real' than the transient, ever-shifting (brain) components that could conceivably be erased by a cerebral accident or catastrophic change in circumstances? I think not. Rather it is a set of concepts - intuitive, unconscious beliefs and ways of interpreting information that are programmed into our brains, partly by our genes and partly by our environment".
52
51
Maddox, B. (2007) Freud's Wizard: the enigma of Ernest Jones. London: John
Murray (Publishers). Page 3.
52 Carter, R. (2002) Consciousness. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Page 213.

Crick's emphasis on ‘a vast assembly of nerve cells' overlooked the
essential environment into which the new human organism always arrives - and from which it is impossible to imagine a human escaping. Even if we grow up and decide to become hermits, and live in isolated caves, we still carry historic social environments in our long-term memories.
Furthermore, D.W. Winnicott attributed primary importance to the environment in children's development 53 . ‘Primary’, of course, does not mean ‘sole’. The child brings something with it, and it participates in a dialectical encounter with mother, father and so on, resulting in a confluence of forces that together shape the new individual's character and personality. To remind yourself of the child's contribution to this process, remember the ‘terrible twos' and the ‘teenage revolt'.
So when I said above, Perhaps I am just this physical organism, I was overlooking the whole social/cultural/emotional level of ‘meness'. The idea that I am ‘just a body' does not account for the whole of me: My thinking; my emotions; and my personal history, and experience of my social and physical environments.
Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical organism, with all of its experience
(of self and social environment) stored in memory.
That's better, but it needs refining.
Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical organism, with all of its cumulative, interpretative experience of self and social environment, stored in
long term memory.
6. The importance of good and evil
At this point I realized that there was something missing here.
Where does good and evil come from? I had studied morality as part of my doctoral journey, and I now remembered a statement by
53
See also Gerhardt, S. (2004)
Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain . London: Routledge. Page 20.

Solzhenitsyn which was quoted in Paul and Elder (2006) 54 . This is what Solzhenitsyn said on the subject of good and evil:
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being".
My own experience of life, including my reading and studying activities, supports this proposition in opposition to what I see as a tendency towards the naïve view expressed by Nelson-Jones (2001) to the effect that we all have a ‘core of goodness'. (Pages 392-
393) 55 . (Nelson-Jones' position is quite muddled in that he acknowledges that human behaviour can be positive or negative, but he seems to blame the world, and/or the individual's choices, rather than innate tendencies, for the emergence of what Freud called ‘the bad animal', or ‘wolf', aspect of human behaviour. This naïve view of human nature - which is hard to credit in a post-Nazi world - was also shared by Carl Rogers, the founder of personcentred counselling: (Nelson-Jones, 2001, page 96). On the other hand, the Native American Cherokee people had the concept of a war going on inside each human being. That war is between two wolves: the good wolf and the bad wolf.
56 And the wolf that wins the war is the one that is fed the most!
So, one of the most important developmental challenges for every human being is to learn how to starve our bad wolf, and to feed only our good wolf. The core of the good wolf is love, empathy, charity and a range of other virtues (or what Freud called Eros, or the love instinct; while the core of the bad wolf is anger, rage, resentment, envy, jealousy, meanness, and other vices (which
Freud called Thanatos, or the death urge).
57
These insights led to a modification of my model as follows:
54
Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2006) Understanding the Foundations of Ethical Reasoning.
Second Edition. The Foundation for Critical Thinking.
55
Nelson-Jones, R. (2001) Theory and Practice of Counselling and Therapy. Third edition. London: Continuum.
56
Vitale, J. (2006) Life's Missing Instruction Manual: the guidebook you should have been given at birth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
57 Freud, S. (1995b) Beyond the pleasure principle. In: Gay, P. (ed) The Freud
Reader. London: Vintage Books. Pages 594-595; 618-621.

Figure 8 - The good and bad wolf are inherent in human nature, and in human culture, and the proportions are variable in each individual over time, and from situation to situation
If you want a general insight into the good and bad wolf in all humans consider this: It does seem to be the case that humans find it easier to initiate bad habits than good habits; and easier to terminate good habits than bad habits. In this sense, the bad wolf seems to have an innate advantage over the good wolf. This may be why we have had to develop controlling religions, and legal and moral systems: to constrain the bad wolf.
It seems important at this point to refer back to additional literature on this subject which is available to me, in addition to Paul and
Elder (2006) and Vitale (2006), cited above.
Firstly, in his early formulations of his theory, Freud considered that the ‘it', or neonate (or newborn baby), was primitive, unorganized and illogical.
58 He went on to say: "We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations
58
Storr, A. (2001) Freud: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Page 60.

... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctive needs, subject to the observance of the pleasure principle".
59
Later in his career, Freud revised this theory heavily, in order to achieve some degree of scientific respectability, by linking it to putative ‘biological principles'. In Freud (1940 [1938]) 60 , he argues that there are essentially two basic urges in the ‘id' - which is (let us remind ourselves) essentially the physical neonate's, or newborn baby's, essence - and these are love and affection (Eros) and hate and aggression (Thanatos) 61 . These are sometimes referred to as the life urge and the death urge. Unlike Freud, I am not trying to establish credibility with biologists, but rather with moral philosophers and developmental psychologists. I do not consider that biologists have anything much to teach us about the human mind, which is a cultural entity - albeit that it is predicated upon a
biological organism, and is in many respects constrained in its structure and organization by that biological organism.
It may be that all of the innate instincts of the human organism can be subsumed within the urges towards love/affection versus hate/aggression; but I very much doubt it. The instinct to suckle the mother's breast, for example, is found in animals at all levels of complexity. We can see it in domestic cats and dogs. But would we ascribe to the suckling urge of a kitten or puppy the urge of "love and affection"? I think not. These are urges that preceded love and affection, and have to do with survival - but as an outcome and not as a motivation. We can never know anything about the urge that drives babies towards the mother's breast, or that urge that leads to pursuing that suckling to completion. These are unutterable, innate urges that underlie all life forms - the life urge; the pattern of innate intelligence that grows life - of nature
naturing, rather than nature natured.
62
59
Storr (2001), page 61.
60
Freud, S. (1940 [1938]) An outline of psychoanalysis. In: Sigmund Freud (1993)
Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. The Penguin Freud Library,
Vol.15. London: Penguin Books. Pages 618-621.
61
Freud (1940 [1938]), page 621.
62 Watts, A. (1962/1990) The Way of Zen. London: Arkana/Penguin. Page 32.

We do, however, know that the history of every major culture includes a history of moral education of the young 63 . But why should the young need moral education? Only because, left to their own devices, they would often live their lives from not just hate and aggression - one of Freud's two basic urges - but also from greed and envy and inappropriate lust, larceny of other people's goods, and so on. The basic nature of the neonate - in potential, and normally realized in the toddler and beyond - is to be split between:
(1) The bad urges: and wanting to hate and reject any ‘bad object' - mother, father, etc - who frustrates or displeases them. And wanting justice and fairness, but more for themselves than for others; and imposing injustice and unfairness on others, power permitting 64 . (E.g. school bullies, gang members, etc). And:
(2) The good urges: of wanting to love any ‘good object' - mother, father, etc - who serves them and supports them – and wanting what is best for their nearest and dearest.
This kind of splitting of parents into ‘good objects' and ‘bad objects' is described in the literature produced by Melanie Klein 65 . Klein's theory of ‘splitting' suggests that every baby experiences both love and hate for the mother, and significant others, and also splits those individuals (‘objects') into ‘good objects', when they are seen as supportive, and ‘bad objects', when they are experienced as frustrating or unfulfilling. These good and bad objects have their internal corollaries in the form of the baby's bad, aggressive urges, and their good, loving urges.
We also know from authors like Zimbardo (2007) that all humans have a ‘good and faultless side' and an ‘evil and wicked side'.
66
Zimbardo, it may be recalled, has more than forty years experience of reflecting upon psychological experiments to explore the moral tendencies of humans, including: (a) Milgram's electrocution experiments (1963, 1974) 67 - in which very ordinary people went to
63
Haidt, J. (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science. London: William Heinemann. Pages 158-160.
64
Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2006) Understanding the Foundations of Ethical
Reasoning. Second Edition. The Foundation for Critical Thinking. Pages 4-7.
65
Klein, described in: Gomez, L. (1997) An Introduction to Object Relations.
London: Free Association Books. Page 34-35; 37-38.
66
Zimbardo, P. (2007) The Lucifer Effect: how good people turn evil. London:
Rider. Page 3.
67
Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row.

extraordinary lengths in (apparently) harming others; (b) his own
Stanford Prison Experiment (in Zimbardo et al, 1973) 68 , and (c) his special study of torture carried out by ‘ordinary American troops' at
Abu Ghraib prison, in Baghdad, Iraq. One of Zimbardo's (2007) conclusions is that human morality and immorality are ‘situational'.
That is to say, they have more to do with the environmental pressures upon most of us than to do with fixed, inner states. That does not deny that we have innate moral and immoral emotions and tendencies; nor does it deny that our moral education is very important. It only implies that we can be quickly pressurized, forced, or conditioned, into behaving from our ‘evil side', unless we have very strong commitments to resist those pressures. But our good and bad innate sides, and good and bad socialized sides, are taken for granted in the body of research and commentary reviewed by Zimbardo (2007).
The concept of "innate good and evil" - or the two wolves - can be found in many schools of Buddhist philosophy. For example:
'Concerning the nature of good and evil, Nichiren Daishonin states:
"Good and evil have been inherent in life since time without beginning...The heart of the Lotus school is the doctrine of three thousand realms in a single moment of life, which reveals that both good and evil are inherent even in those at the highest stage of perfect enlightenment. The fundamental nature of enlightenment manifests itself as Brahma and Shakra, whereas the fundamental darkness manifests itself as the devil king of the sixth heaven" (The
Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p. 1113). The Daishonin explains that all people are endowed with supreme good and evil, as well as all the possible life states in between. We can be either as godly as
"Brahma and Shakra" or as devilish as the "devil king".'
'To see our innate good and evil is to experience the joy of accepting our whole being. As Tillich said, "Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one's own true being" (The
Courage to Be, p.14) 69 .
68
Zimbardo, P. G., Banks, W.C., Craig, H. and Jaffe, D. (1973) A Pirandellian prison:
The mind is a formidable jailor. New York Times Magazine, April 8 th
, 38-60.
69 Tillich, P.J. (1952) The Courage to Be . Yale University Press.

Such honest and courageous acceptance of the self also marks the beginning of the essential transformation of our lives and the world around us’.
70
On the other hand, Christianity makes good and evil contingent upon acts of free will; but both possibilities, or tendencies, exist inherently, or innately, for all humans. In Christianity, the Bad Wolf is called Original Sin, or innate sinfulness.
The question of innate good and evil is also dealt with in literature.
For examples: To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Harper Lee; and Lord of
the Flies, by William Golding. And also in Shakespeare: e.g.
Macbeth. Furthermore, Paul Oppenheimer, professor of comparative medieval literature and English at the City University of
New York, has published a detailed study of the concept of evil in literature and films.
71
And in politics, the Holocaust was a major indicator not only of our innate good and evil potentialities, but also our capacity to delude ourselves into thinking we are doing good when we are patently performing acts of ultimate evil. But worse was to come, as first the populations of America and Europe had to wake up to the evils exposed by the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War campaigns; and then the truth about life within the Soviet Union:
(Oppenheimer, 1996; pages 172-173).
Let me finally re-present the model that I presented above:
70
By Shin Yatomi, based in part on Yasashii Kyogaku (Easy Buddhist Study) published by Seikyo Press in 1994. Available online at : http://www.sgiusa.org/memberresources/resources/buddhist_concepts/buddhist_concept32.php.
Accessed: 27th December 2009.
71
Oppenheimer, P. (1996) Evil and the Demonic: A new theory of monstrous behaviour. London: Duckworth.

Figure 9 - The good and bad wolf are inherent in human nature, and in human culture, and the proportions are variable
The only deficiency in this model is that the dividing line between the good and bad sides of both id and superego are shown as fixed.
In fact they are highly variable, depending in particular upon moral education and situational factors: (including both pressures to do evil, and temptations or opportunities to benefit from evil acts). But
I have found it too challenging to develop a way to indicate that variability in this illustration. But that variability should always be born in mind.
7. Now who am I now?
So, back to the question: Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical organism, with all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences (of self and social environment), stored
in long term memory...
But how am I modelling "cumulative, interpretative experience"?

Figure 10(a): Experiences are stored in long term memory in a time sequence which is cumulative, and in a form which is interpretative
In Figure 10(a), I try to show that some experiences are more fundamental than others, because they occur earlier. This could just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, be shown as a clustering of experiences, with the oldest at the core, and the newer ones building upon them in ever growing outer layers. And it is pertinent to ask, what does this actually look like in the human brain?

Figure 10(b): The cells in the baby’s brain are gradually interconnected, and those interconnections are what are called ‘cumulative, interpretive experiences’ above. (Borrowed, with acknowledgement, from Taylor,
1999 72 ).
There are three images of neuronal connections in a baby’s brain in
Figure 10(b): at birth, on the left; at 2 years, on the right; and at
15 months, in the middle. What is shown as a space ‘filling up’, metaphorically, in Figure 10(a), is preexisting neurons forming increasing numbers of interconnections.
The baby arrives with some innate emotional templates and temperamental predispositions. Those are then impacted by cultural experience of limbic resonance, and alter by linguistic cultural experiences.
The fact that our experiences are cumulative and interpretative means that whatever happened in the past shapes and colours our responses to new experiences. This is what I call our ‘thrownness' - we are cumulatively shaped by the environment into which we are thrown, which is already/always forcing its beliefs on new arrivals.
73 And whatever our earliest experiences happened to be, deliberately or accidentally, we interpret in our ‘accumulated way', and then expect it to be repeated in the future.
72
Taylor, D. (ed) (1999) Talking Cure: Mind and methof of the Tavistock Clinic.
London: Duckworth. Page 53.
73
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

So, once again, back to the question: Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical organism, with all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences (of self and social environment), stored
in long term memory...
But I need to be a lot more precise about what is meant by that statement.
8. Developmental psychology
Around the end of 2008 I made a detailed study of Douglas
Hofstadter's book on the philosophy of selfhood 74 , and some of that is relevant here, especially for readers who cannot conceptualize what was ‘present' before the baby's first experiences of being suckled by mother, held by mother, etc. Hofstadter's book is a rollercoaster ride of exciting theories and thought experiments. His conclusion seems to be that we humans are self aware loops of
consciousness of consciousness, dependent upon linguistic concepts. The richer the body of concepts stored in an organism, the richer the sense of self of the organism will be. Thus a mosquito is conceptualized as having no self, while a human baby has a rich potential self. But at birth none of that potential is realized. At one point he says: "..babies and embryos have a fantastic potential thanks to their human genes, to become homes for huge symbol-repertoires that will grow and grow for many decades, while mosquitoes have no such potential". (Page 209).
(Afterthought: I have recently been reading Lewis, Amini and
Lannon, 2001 75 ; and this experience has alerted me to the fact that
Hofstadter could fall into the error of being ‘too cognitive’ and not
‘emotive’ enough in his modelling of the neonate, or newborn baby.
It seems that Bowlby’s attachment theory “…held that proximity to the mother herself is an inborn need…” [page 72] which implies that the baby is born with the urge to seek her out, and depend upon her presence, and to squawk and bleat if she strays, in order to draw her back 76 . At birth, a baby may be ‘mainly potential’, but
74 Hofstadter, D. (2007) I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.
75 Lewis, T., Amini, F. and Lannon, R. (2001) A General Theory of Love. New York:
Vintage Books.
76
See also: Gerhardt, S. (2004)
Why Love Matters: how affection shapes a baby’s brain. London: Routledge.

it is hardwired for relationship, and will die without adequate
emotional contact).
For those readers who have read little or no philosophy and psychology, let me outline some aspects of the history of human perception of the human baby's mind at birth. Back in ancient
Athens, it was apparently widely believed that humans are born with a great deal of knowledge innately available to them, if not all knowledge. For example, in his dialogue entitled the Meno, Plato purports to reveal Socrates working with a boy (who is one of
Meno's attendants) to demonstrate that there is a distinction to be made between teaching something to the boy, and merely
helping the boy to remember. Plato presents the reader with an image of Socrates ‘drawing out of the boy' an innate
understanding of geometry.
77 Descartes, as a neo-Platonist, carried this view into the modern world. However, this perspective on the state of the human mind at birth did not survive the enquires and investigations of the British Empiricists, as John Locke argued cogently that the human mind at birth is a ‘tabula rasa', or a blank sheet; that all knowledge is a result of experience, and/or reflection on experience; and that "theorizing is the construction of hypotheses on the basis of analogies, not penetration to the essence of things by super-sensory means".
78
Returning to Hofstadter (2007), he goes on to describe the beginning of human extra-uterine life a follows:
"...we humans are born with only the tiniest hints of what our perceptual systems will metamorphose into as we interact with the world over the course of decades. At birth, our repertoire of categories is so minimal that I would call it nil for all practical purposes. Deprived of symbols to trigger, a baby cannot make sense of what William James evocatively called the ‘big, blooming, buzzing confusion' of its sensory input. The building up of a selfsymbol is still far in the future, and so in babies there exists no strange loop of selfhood, or nearly none". (Page 209).
(Here the reader will note that Hofstadter is indeed discounting the emotional wiring of the neonate).
77 Plato (1871/1999) Meno. In: The Essential Plato . Book of the Month Club. Pages
444-452.
78
Routledge (2000) Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London:
Routledge. Page 493.

It is historically significant that Hofstadter uses the concept
‘categories', as we will see in the next paragraph. This limited repertoire of ‘categories' means that we begin our life with little or no symbolic capacity to make sense of life, and yet we must immediately begin to make some kind of sense of life - even if it turns out to be well off target. (And it seems to take four or five months of experience of interacting with mother before the infant can learn to distinguish itself from mother as separate beings; so it is a slow process to begin with) 79 . But how does this get started if we have no concepts to begin with?
Kant began to explain this when, in his Critique of Pure Reason, responding to Lock and Hume, he argued that the new born baby has a brain/mind that contains ‘categories' with which experiences can be captured and shaped.
80 For Kant, these categories included, ultimately: space, time and causality. (He also "...joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality".) 81 But he listed twelve categories of mind in all, grouped into four groups of: "...quantity, quality, relation and modality".
82 One hundred and fifty years later, Korzybski (1933) 83 summarized the ‘categories of mind' to include structure, order and
relations. In other words, he contended that the new born baby has the innate capacity to develop an intuitive understanding of how their early experiences can be subjected to some kind of structure, some kind of order, and some idea of how they relate to each other. This is clearly a capacity that is subject to time based developmental processes, and is very crude at the point of birth.
(Please note here that I am being led away from the emotional wiring of the neonate by considerations of cognitive processing, about which science has been concerned for some decades. It is only very recently that cognitive scientists noticed that they have
79
Mahler, M.S., Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975/1987) The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant: Symbiosis and individuation. London: Maresfield Library.
80
Blackwell, S. (1994) The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
81
Routledge (2000) Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London:
Routledge. Page 433.
82 Kant, I. (1790/1987) Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner P. Pluhar. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company. Pages xxxii - xxxiii.
83
Korzybski, A. (1933/1958) Science and Sanity. Lakeville, Connecticut:
International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co.

been overlooking human emotion as part of the very foundations of our capacity to attend, perceive, think, interpret, and, of course, feel.)
The researches of Piaget, Bruner and Vygotsky help to expand this
(cognitive) understanding into an awareness of how brain development facilitates more and more complex ‘operations' of the mind.
84 Perhaps, following Bruner, we can see that the new infant will initially encode records of their felt, physical experiences, which later, through a process of refinement, will develop into the capacity to encode their own ‘enactive' experiences - limb movement, etc.
On top of this experience could then be build the visual experiences of the new baby. And later, through further biological and social development, the capacity will emerge of being able to encode semantic, language based concepts and records of events/objects.
According to Vygotsky, these developments depend on social instruction and modelling. The new baby takes over ideas from its linguistic culture as empty categories, which need to be repeatedly refined over a period of years, as experience expands and the brain itself become capable of more complex operations.
85
(This is a long way from the presentations of Lewis et al, 2001 and
Gerhardt, 2003, who both begin with communication from the limbic system of the mother to the limbic system of the neonate – face to face, and eye to eye, emotional communication which serves the function of regulating the inner workings of the body and mind of the neonate, through a process called ‘limbic resonance) 86 . In other words, the baby is primarily and initially an emotive being, and communicates about its emotional responses to its felt environment).
While Piaget, Bruner and Vygotsky deal with the cognitive development of the growing infant, Freud suggests that the infant
84 Wood, D. (1988) How Children Think and Learn: the social contexts of cognitive development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
85
Lunzer, E. (1989) Cognitive development: learning and the mechanisms of change.
In: Murphy, P and Moon, B. (eds) Developments in Learning and Assessment.
London: Hodder and Stoughton/Open University Press.
And:
Wood, D. (1988) How Children Think and Learn: the social contexts of cognitive development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
86
Lewis, et al. (2001), pages 63-65, emphasize the dialectical/interactive nature of this relationship. Gerhardt (2003), pages 18-20, while acknowledging the dialectic, tends to give prime importance to the social environment.

has two innate urges or drives; Eros and Thanatos: or the Love/life urge and the Death/destruction urge.
Thus babies in the first few months of life create memories of simple experiences, which are emotionally coloured by love or hate, pleasure or unpleasure, satisfaction or frustration, and so on. In the process they are assumed to ‘split' their mothers into two: the good mother and the bad mother; and this then forms the template for other relationships. In other words, we internalize interpretative records of good aspects of our carers and bad aspects of our carers; and we have our emotional attitudes towards those internalizations.
As indicated above, the interpenetrating bond between mother and baby is recorded in both brains: the mother's and the baby's. The baby's interior experience, in its first four or five months, may be somewhat like this:
Figure 11: The symbiotic baby in the paranoid/schizoid phase
Somewhere in the fourth or fifth month, normally, the baby begins to notice the mother as distinct and separate from ‘itself': (Mahler,
Pine and Bergman) 87 . This begins the phase known in Klein as ‘the depressive position' - in which the baby loses its sense of
87
Mahler, M.S., Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975/1987) The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant: Symbiosis and individuation. London: Maresfield
Library.

omnipotence, and ‘falls into a dependent separateness'. (Cf:
Gomez, 1997) 88 .
This is the proper beginning of the formation of distinctions; the internalization of mother and her doings/sayings. On to this crude foundation of emotional/felt interpretative experiences, we then accumulate further interpretations based on those earliest interpretative experiences, and so we head off in some direction in terms of ‘constructing our own felt world in our heads' which will have to be corrected later, when we have more capacity to understand what a false foundation lies at the root of our ‘personal knowledge'. In fact it will have to be corrected many times, as we pass through various stages of childhood development. And modern psychotherapy is an expression of that need for correction.
So, back to my post-Koan question: Who am I?
Perhaps I am just this physical/emotional organism
With all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences 89 (Afterthought
No.1 below)
Including internalized representations of good and bad aspects of significant others (in my environment) 90
Stored in long term memory
In the form of electro-chemical corollaries of stories, scripts,
frames, schemas and other narrative elements
Below the level of conscious awareness
And permanently beyond direct conscious inspection. (Afterthought
No.2 below).
Afterthought No.1: As I was reading an interview with Dr David
Wallin 91 , on the implications of attachment theory for
88
Gomez, L. (1997) An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association
Books.
89
Especially experience of emotional relationship with significant others. (Lewis et al.
2001: pages 142-144).
90 And how they related to us…

psychotherapy, I realized that I was not utilizing my understanding of mindfulness, awareness, and meditation, which I had written up in Byrne (2001) 92 . Although I may be fundamentally a physical body, with capacities, I often get it the wrong way around and assume I am one or more of those capacities, such as the capacity to be aware, or the (apparent) capacity to form a personal viewpoint. But it seems the physical organism comes before its capacities, and is equipped with:
(a) an innate emotional urge to attach to a carer.
(b) an innate potential to (increasingly) detect space and time, and causality (as argued by Kant).
(c) a developmental capacity to notice structure, order and relations in its perceptions (as argued in General Semantics) 93 .
(d) a tendency to identify with something and then believe ‘I am
that’, as argued in Buddhist psychology.
When, in adult life, we have the opportunity to engage in meditative mindfulness, we realise that those are false identifications, or, at least, unhelpful identifications. We can choose to dis-identify from our false or unhelpful identifications. We can recreate ourselves, in our own perceptions.
But there is a paradox here. If I use science to define myself, I then subjectively identify with that definition, but I had better recall that I have capacity to identify with many possibilities, and not all of those possibilities are helpful, and not all of them are durably convincing. So we need to exercise caution!
Afterthought No.2: I seem to be largely non-conscious. According to Bargh and Chartrand (1999), I probably non-consciously manage
91
Van Nuys, D. (2009) An interview with David Wallin, PhD. On the implications of attachment theory for psychotherapy. MentalHelp.net. Available online: http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=29433 . Accessed: 23 rd
June 2010.
92
Byrne, J. (2002) Supreme Self-Confidence in 150 Days: a comprehensive selftraining manual. Hebden Bridge: ABC Coaching Publications.
93
Korzybski, A. (1933/1958) Science and Sanity. Lakeville, Connecticut:
International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co.

about 95% of my ongoing behaviours 94 . This is what is known as
‘the adaptive unconscious’.
95
I now want to clarify another aspect of this full statement of what I may be; and what we may be. This is the bit about "internalized representations".
9. Conceptualizing the internalizing process
When I first began to model the process of interaction of the two intersecting circles, representing mother and baby, I stored a simple
‘X' for each experience that baby created of the mother's actions - as in Figure 6 above.
Later on, when I was reading and digesting Hofstadter (2007) I began to use the @ sign to represent ‘strange loops' - as when the child internalizes a clear ‘representation' of the mother.
After some time using that convention, I realized that it is important to distinguish between the pre-linguistic and post-linguistic phases of human development. The young babe-in-arms most likely encodes feelings about mother, and images of mother; while toddlers and young children most likely encode semantic concepts about their discrete interactions with mother, and father, using language and its non-conscious corollaries.
96 The right hemisphere of the brain can grasp a whole image, for example mother's face.
On the other hand, the left hemisphere, when utilizing language based encoding of experience, records bits rather than wholes.
97
Thus, as the child ages, and gets beyond two or three years of age, and especially after the age of seven, they are most likely to be encoding internalizations of discrete bits of mother's speech and actions. And we in the world of counselling and psychotherapy already have a language for describing those discrete bits of human
94
Bargh, J.A. and Chartrand, T.L. (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being.
American Psychologist, 54(7): 462-479.
95
Gladwell, M. (2006) BLINK: The power of thinking without thinking. London:
Penguin Books.
96
Wood, D. (1988) How Children Think and Learn: the social contexts of cognitive development.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
97 For examples: Rose, C. (1989) Accelerated Learning. Fourth edition. Aylesbury,
Bucks: Accelerated Learning System Ltd. Pages 11-14. And:
De Porter, B. (1993) Quantum Learning: unlesh the genius within you. London:
Piatkus. Pages 36-40.

behaviour - of encounters between parents and children - which was created by Dr Eric Berne, MD, the originator of Transactional
Analysis (TA), back in the early post-war period.
98
Towards the end of his life, Freud had begun to emphasize the ego over the id, and to begin to look at divisions and conflicts within the ego. The language of Berne's TA argues that individuals have three major subdivisions within their ego, and these are called the Parent ego state; the Child ego state; and the Adult ego state.
99 The following illustration shows how these ego states are normally represented graphically:
Figure 12: The basic functional model of Transactional Analysis - the Ego
State Model
Our Parent ego-state (P) is said to comprise behaviours, thoughts and feelings that we copied from parents or parent figures: (Stewart and Joines, 1987; page 12). To reproduce them later in life, we must have ‘internalized them', by modelling them from some parent figure in our past history. Furthermore, the Parent ego-state has two sub-divisions: the Nurturing Parent (NP) and the Controlling
98 Berne, E. (1968) Games People Play: the psychology of human relationships.
London: Penguin Books. And also:
Stewart, I. and Joines, V. (1987) TA Today: A new introduction to Transactional
Analysis. Nottingham and Chapel Hill: Lifespace Publishing.
99
Berne (1968); page 25.

Parent (CP) ego states: (Stewart and Joines; page 21). An example of a Nurturing Parent behaviour would be providing comfort. And an example of a Controlling Parent behaviour would be setting
boundaries, or denying permission to do something. A further complication of the Parent ego-state is that both the Nurturing
Parent and the Controlling Parent have a positive and a negative side, in line with my model in Figure 8, above, showing the good
(G) and bad (B) sides of the child and the parent. Coding these states would then be GNP, BNP, GCP, BCP.
Our Child ego-state is said to consist of behaviours, thoughts and feelings replayed from our own individual childhood. We memorize everything that we experienced as a child, in largely inaccessible stores. The Child ego-state is also split into two sub-divisions: the
Adapted/Rebellious Child (AC/RC), on the one hand, and the Free or
Natural Child (FC or NC), on the other. Very often as children we may adapt to the demands of our parents; and adapt; and adapt; and then suddenly rebel. This is an illustration of the functioning of the Adapted/Rebellious Child ego state. An example of the Free or
Natural Child ego state would be expressing excitement about a trip to the zoo; or expressing curiosity about worms in damp ground.
Or perhaps expressing excitement about playing games with other children. And again, both the Adapted Child and the Free Child egostates have positive (or Good [G]) and negative (or Bad [B]) aspects, in line with Figure 8 above. These states could then be coded as follows: GFC, BFC, GAC, BAC, GRC, BRC.
Our Adult ego state (A) consists of behaviours, thoughts and feelings which are "direct responses to the here-and-now".
100 The
Adult ego-state is often seen as the ‘computing power' of the brain/mind; the rational and reasoning aspect of the individual, relatively free of strong emotional colouration: (though there is
always some emotional colouration of cognition) 101 . The early precursor of the Adult ego-state in the growing child is called the
Little Professor (LP) 102 , which is the part of the child that keeps asking the parent "Why is the sky blue?"; "Why can't I fly?"; and so on. And again, the Adult ego state has its good and bad sides. The
Adult ego-state can be applied to planning a new town on a drawing board; or planning to rob a bank. Both activities require logic,
100
Stewart and Joines (1987); page 12.
101
Damasio, A.R. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.
102
Stewart and Joines (1987); page 31.

reason, critical thinking faculties, planning skills, etc. The codes here would be: GA, BA, GLP, BLP.
Let us now link this PAC model back to the intersecting circles model of the mother and child:
Figure 13: How the ten elements of the PAC model - (4 Ps, 4Cs, 2 As) - emerge within the dialectical ego space between the mother and child
This is not too difficult to understand. When mother operates from her ‘Nurturing Parent' ego state, we may - depending upon how we interpret the experience - internalize a sense of being loved, and of loving the one who does the loving. Our response may be to ‘adapt' to mother.
As we become more mobile, mother may operate from ‘Controlling
Parent' ego state, to protect us from harm, for example. And we may internalize a (subjective, interpretative) sense of being

mistreated, because she has frustrated us. In this case, we may respond by ‘rebelling'.
Logically, the possibilities are as follows:
1. When mother behaves in what a group of her peers would agree is a good way, baby may respond by classifying her behaviour as
either good or bad. And he/she (baby) may adapt from his/her good or bad side; or he/she (baby) may rebel from his/her good or bad side.
2. When mother behaves towards her baby in what a group of her peers would agree is a bad way, baby may respond by classifying her behaviour as either good or bad. And he/she may adapt from his/her good or bad side; or he/she may rebel from his/her good or bad side.
3. To clarify: baby can interpret mother's behaviour as good or bad: regardless of whether or not it is good or bad. And baby can – and probably sometimes does - (perversely) respond with rebellion against Good Nurturing Parent and with adaptation towards Bad
Controlling Parent.
Of course, mother is not restricted to operating from Nurturing
Parent or Controlling Parent with her baby. She can also operate from Good or Bad Adult ego state; and Good or Bad Child ego state. When mother plays kindly with baby, she may be operating from a mixture of Good Nurturing Parent and Good Free Child.
When I talk about "internalized representations of good and bad aspects of significant others" in the future, I will be clearly referring to Good and/or Bad Nurturing Parent (GNP and/or BNP); Good and/or Bad Controlling Parent (GCP and/or BCP); Good and/or Bad
Adapted Child (GAC and/or BAC); Good and/or Bad Rebellious Child
(GRC and/or BRC); Good and/or Bad Adult (GA and/or BA); and
Good and/or Bad Little Professor (GLP and/or BLP).
This changes my self conception as follows:
Perhaps I am just this physical/emotional organism
With all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences 103
103 Lewis et al (2001) – pages 134-135 – support the idea of cumulative, interpretative experience as the stuff of what humans learn as we grow and develop, but they also emphasize that this is highly fallible , and use the example of the famous psychological experiments on eyewitness testimony which showed that: “Although

Including internalized representations of good and bad aspects of
significant others
And all of my good and bad adaptations towards them
And my good and bad reactions or rebellions against them
Predicated upon my innate and socialized capacity to perfink 104
Stored in long term memory
In the form of electro-chemical corollaries of stories, scripts,
frames, schemas and other narrative elements
Below the level of conscious awareness
And permanently beyond direct conscious inspection.
105
Initially, I internalize aspects of my mother (in the form of felt experiences); then my father; then my siblings; other relatives; school and neighbourhood peers; and out further into ever widening circles of social interaction, for the whole of my life. But the earliest internalizations are the most fundamental, the most tenacious, and the most predictive of my thinking/feeling/behaving states 106 . As it most people do not realized it, they are incapable of remembering events as they happened. In study after study, [the research participants] incorporate fragments from earlier or later incidents, general expectations and implications [gleaned from leading questions] into their memories of what they saw and heard”. (Page 134).
104
Perfink is a contraction of ‘perceive, feel and think’, of unknown origin. All of my cumulative interpretative experiences are subjective: I perceive them, feel them and think them, based on my previous experiences, which are heavily socialized, and limited by my human nature.
105
We cannot look into our minds to see what is there. We cannot directly access any stored memories. Lewis et al. (2001) distinguish between implicit and explicit memory. Implicit memory is tacit and non-conscious, and this is the form that our emotional experience takes. We cannot know anything about it. Explicit memory is the kind of memory that is reconstitutive (Bartlett, 1932), which allows us to recall some kind of reconstruction of past events , in a highly imperfect form. (E.g. remember the eyewitness testimony research mentioned above). The point to note is this: a highly imperfect reconstruction of some past event is not the same as a “correct conscious inspection” of a memory trace.
106 However, they are not fixed entities. They are not carved in stone. Or as Lewis et al. (2001) say: “The brain’s past is not carved into the solid rock we would like (and imagine) memory to be. Instead, the story of each life is traced in a sand dune that the wind of time and experience gradually sculpt from one shape to another. After their

turns out, all of the elements that I have internalized can be classified into (good and bad) Controlling Parent and/or Nurturing
Parent incoming elements; (good and bad) Adult incoming elements; (good and bad) Adapted Child responses; (good and bad)
Rebellious Child responses; (good and bad) Free Child responses to the stimulus of my environment; and, as time goes by, (good and bad) Little Professor computations and resulting actions, as the foundations of my Adult cognitive functioning begin to take shape.
Permit me one final amendment to my self description above:
Perhaps I am just this physical organism (body/brain/mind)
Including its feeling/affective foundation (in the limbic
system)
And its language based cognitive/emotive superstructure (in
the neocortex)
With all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences
Including internalized representations of good and bad aspects of
significant others
And all of my good and bad adaptations towards them
And my good and bad reactions and rebellions against them
Plus my ‘attachment style’ towards them 107
Predicated upon my innate and socialized capacity to perfink first instant, our memory traces start shifting away from what they were, and we can never retrieve the pristine data they once encoded”. (Page 134). This accounts for the poor performance of participants in the eyewitness testimony tests referred to above.
However, our emotional memories may be more durable than our cognitive memories, and harder to change. As Lewis et al. (2001): “The limbic (or mammalian, or emotional) brain contains is emotional Attractors (or templates, or patterns) encoded early in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural system that view the emotional world and conduct relationships”. (Page 140). If the early childhood relationships are healthy, then the Attractors/Patterns will be functional and helpful; but if the early childhood relationships are unhealthy, the Attractors/Patterns will be dysfunctional and unhelpful to the individual.
107
I am either ‘securely attached’ or ‘insecurely attached’ to my mother and father; and those attachments determine how secure or insecure I will feel in all of my future relationships. My attachment style may be determined by my mother’s experience and beliefs in her own childhood relationships. (Main et al, 1985; Fonagy et al, 1991; and O’Connor and Croft, 2001).

Stored in long term memory
In the form of electro-chemical corollaries of stories, scripts,
frames, schemas and other narrative elements
Below the level of conscious awareness
And permanently beyond direct conscious inspection.
Perhaps that is what I most fundamentally am. And thus, although
I am distinct from others, I carry many others inside my head, and am indeed made up of many ‘social/relational/interactional bits and pieces'. So I am both individual and social. But I am very far from being a ‘separate entity'. Because my sense of ‘self' develops in lockstep with my sense of ‘society', and with my biological development, none of these three ‘levels' of ‘me/I/us' can exist without the other. And how securely I am attached to others is shaped by my earliest emotional experiences of love and connection with my mother (and later my father). (Gerhardt, 2003, pages 25-
31).
10. Complexity and the Emergence of the ‘I'
When I was a young child, I internalized my interpretations of good and bad aspects of my mother, father, brothers and sisters, peers, neighbours, school teachers, and many others. As Bandura would say, I "modelled myself upon them", and thus became like them.
108
(indeed, my attachment style is predicted by my mother’s beliefs about attachment, even if she is assessed before I was born) 109 .
However, I am not aware of carrying them inside of me, as they are in the non-conscious basement of my mind. But we are all familiar with the idea of ‘having role models', or ‘emulating others'.
With regard to understanding the non-conscious basement of my mind: Back in the summer of 1977, I was enjoying a relaxing weekend with some South American friends in Bangladesh. We had been playing music and singing, and writing poetry, and drinking
108
Bandura, A. (1965) Influence of model's reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1:
Page 589-595. And:
Bandura, A. (1973) Aggression: a social learning analysis. London: Prentice Hall.
109
Main, M., Kaplan, N. and Cassidy, J. (1985) Security, infancy, childhood and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. Monographs of the Society for
Research in Child Development, 50(1-2) (Serial number 209).

tea. It was a very creative space we had manufactured with a small group of likeminded individuals. All at once, my friend Carla asked me:
"How does your mind work?"
I reflected for a moment, and gave my best answer:
"Metaphorically, or imaginatively", I said, "it is as if I had a set of floorboards that run backwards from my eyebrows to the back of my head, dividing my cranium into an airy room and a concealed basement. There are a few holes in the floorboards, and a few cartoon worms are bobbing up and down through the floorboards.
Whenever anybody or any thing in my environment acts in a way that calls for a response from me, I (or an inner hand and arm in the airy room) reaches for one of the worms, unwraps a scroll that is wrapped around the worm, reads the content (with an inner eye) and either speaks what is written on the scroll, or acts according to the ‘stage directions' given on the scroll".
It would be a good few years before I eventually asked myself:
"How do I know which worm to choose?"; and that was a difficult question to answer. I eventually realized that the answer is this:
"I (meaning the conscious I) don't make any decisions. The inner hand/arm that is in the airy room is connected to, and controlled by, an intelligence that resides in the basement. The intelligence in the basement decides which worm to choose, because it knows what is on each of the scrolls that are available to choose from".
Doesn't this mean I am an automaton? More or less: yes! In keeping with the presentation by Bargh and Chartrand (1999) I have learned to live with what to others seems like ‘the unbearable automaticity of being'.
110 According to Bargh and Chartrand, I am about 95% non-conscious. I do, of course, pay some conscious attention to some stimuli, some of the time, and that process of conscious awareness is implicated in the storing of new memories in long-term memory. And some theorists think I have a fraction of a second to countermand the speaking or acting from any particular worm-scroll. But when I am ‘consciously thinking', I am
necessarily being aided and abetted by my non-conscious
‘adaptive unconscious'.
111 And there is no clear cut evidence that I
110
Bargh, J.A. and Chartrand, T.L. (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being.
American Psychologist, 54(7): 462-479.
111
Gladwell, M. (2006) BLINK: The power of thinking without thinking . London:
Penguin Books.

have something called ‘conscious free will'. It seems that the most thorough, eliminative materialistic science cannot completely rule out the possibility of free will; and the most romantic, enlightenment philosophy cannot prove the existence of free will:
(Byrne, 2003/2007) 112 .
When I say "I am necessarily being aided and abetted by my
‘adaptive unconscious' mind", what is that conclusion based upon?
It is an application of Alan Baddeley's theory of Working Memory. It seems to me that Working Memory and Conscious-plus-Non-
conscious Processing are one and the same. So let us briefly review the Working Memory model, proposed by Baddeley (1981 and 1990: See references below). There is first a ‘central executive', which seems to be an attentional system (but about which we currently know very little). There is then a ‘visuo-spatial scratch pad' or inner eye; and then the ‘auditory loop', or ‘inner ear'. The central executive provides coordination of a hierarchy of
‘modules' that are processing data, mainly at non-conscious levels, though some consciousness occurs at the tip of the hierarchy.
(Baddeley, 1981 113 , 1986 114 ; Cohen, 1990 115 ; Baddeley, 1990 116 ).
As mentioned earlier, I am a delusional being 117 - like all humans - and just like a child on the top deck of a bus, with a plastic toy steering wheel in its hands, sitting above the driver - I feel I am making decisions about when to speed up and when to slow down; when to turn left and when to turn right. But mostly this is delusional fantasy. I have such a strong ideological belief that I
"run my own life" that, when a certain form of words leaps from my
112
Byrne, J. (2003/2007) Am I completely determined by my genes and my environment? Diploma Assignment 5(c): For Rusland College. Hebden Bridge: ABC
Coaching Publications. Available online as PDF document: http://www.abccounselling.com/id208.html
113 Baddeley, A.D. (1981) The concept of working memory: a view of its current state and probable future development. Cognition, 10: 17-23.
114
Baddeley, A.D. (1986) Working Memory. Hove, East Sussex: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates Ltd.
115
Cohen, G. (1990) Memory. In: Roth, I. (ed) Introduction to Psychology. Volume
2. Hove, East Sussex and Milton Keynes: Open University and Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates Ltd.
116 Baddeley, A.D. (1990) Human Memory. Hove, East Sussex: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates Ltd.
117
Gray, J. (2003) Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals . London:
Granta Books.

mouth, I foolishly either congratulate ‘myself' for their urbanity, or castigate myself for their vacuity. But actually it's ‘the guy in the basement' - who is, admittedly the ‘real me' - who is actually responsible. And the ‘conscious me' is not centrally implicated - but only partially implicated - in my day to day thinking/feeling/acting outputs.
Where then does my ‘sense of self' come from: the ‘delusional I'? It is partly taken over from others. "I must be who they say I am!" It is partly a result of my "sensations of being": my body and its emotions about sensations 118 . It is partly how I see "myself" reflected in the eyes/faces of others 119 ; and how I make up autobiographical stories about myself, which I showed in Chapter 9 to be of questionable veracity, except in terms of core nuggets of events (the main gist being merely how I subjectively experienced it all). It is ‘a strange loop’ of braided encounters with other humans, things and events, as described above. But it is probably mainly "an emergent phenomenon", generated by the complexity of the vast store of memories that this body/organism has collected on its journey so far 120 . In philosophy, systems theory and science,
‘emergent phenomena' are hypothesized to arise out of highly complex interactional systems 121 . And there is no more complex interactional system in the known universe than the human brain/mind 122 . The phenomenon that eventually emerges cannot be predicted in advance, because the contributing interactional processes are too numerous to compute 123 . But we can make some limited attempts to analyze complex systems, both in terms of the interaction of their parts, and also in terms of the relationship of the system to its environment.
118 Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness . London: Vintage.
119
Armstrong, J. (2003) Conditions of Love: the philosophy of intimacy . London:
Penguin Books.
120
Clayton, P. (2005) Mind and Emergence: from quantum to consciousness . Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
121
Johnson, S. (2001) Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and
Software.
New York: Touchstone.
122
Hofstadter, D. (1979),
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
. Harvester
Press.
123 Lewin, R. (2000) Complexity - Life at the Edge of Chaos . Second edition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

The human ego emerges gradually between the ages of about six and eighteen months; and is then strongly defended and solidified by the separating/individuating toddler between the ages of eighteen months and three years: (Mahler, Pine and Bergman,
1997).
The process can be hypothesized as occurring something like this:
Figure 14: A return to the overlapping circles
The child – which is born with some innate emotive predispositions - internalizes lots of these ‘overlapping circle' experiences, which are fundamentally emotional or feeling experiences, mixed with language and images, as shown in the triangle model in Figure 10, above. But now we can elaborate more clearly the nature of those experiences. As explained above, they mainly consist of Critical
Parent (CP), Nurturing Parent (NP), and Adult (A) actions by mum and dad; and the child's good and bad Adapted and Rebellious Child
(AC/RC) adaptations towards them, and reactions/rebellions against them. This can be illustrated as follows:

Figure 15: Cumulative, interpretative experiences of parent and child interactions in NP, AC, CP, RC, and Adult/Little Professor formats
For ease of presentation, I have here omitted the use of the Good
(G) and Bad (B) features of the ego states; but they should normally be assumed.
One way that I remind myself of the good and bad features of the organism is by using the divided overlapping circles in Figures 9 and
10(a) above. However, using that mnemonic can result in overlooking the ways in which we internalize ‘good and bad objects’, or good and bad aspects of mother, father and others. The technique I use to remind myself of this feature of the ‘individual’ is to visualize the mnemonic devices shown in Figure 16 (a) below.

The letters ‘G’ and ‘B’ (in a ‘strange loop’) are used to represent Good and Bad Objects (aspects of mum and dad) internalized by the baby/infant/child.
The letters ‘G’ and ‘B’ in square boxes are used to label the child’s good and bad adaptations towards the
Good object , and their good and bad reactions and rebellions against the Good object .
The letters ‘G’ and ‘B’ in square boxes are used to label the child’s good and bad adaptations towards the
Bad object , and their good and bad reactions and rebellions against the Bad object .
Figure 16(a): Internalized good and bad objects, and our good and bad adaptations towards them, and our reactions against them
Instead of using Figure 10(a) as originally conceived, I have now redesigned it as shown in Figure 16(b), in which the internalization of good and bad objects, and our adaptations towards them and our rebellions against them are made explicit.
Figure 16(b): A dual mnemonic which suggests cumulative, interpretative experiences of relationship (overlapping circles) plus internalization of good and bad aspects of significant others, with our responses

Figure 16(b) reminds me that “…perhaps I am just this physical organism, with all of its cumulative, interpretative experiences (the overlapping circles with a horizontal line between good and bad), including good and bad aspects of significant others (as shown in
Figure 16(a)), and all of my good and bad adaptations towards them, and my good and bad reactions and rebellions against them), stored in long term memory…”
It should be recalled that these cumulative, interpretative experiences – which are strongly emotional, even when they have explicit cognitive content - are stored below the level of conscious awareness, and are permanently beyond direct conscious inspection. Some aspects of those experiences – the visual and language based elements - may from time to time surface into consciousness (in reconstituted, modified form), but they cannot be
directly experienced, and most of them will remain inaccessible for the whole of the individual's life.
Over time, these cumulative, interpretative cognitive-emotive experiences reach a critical mass, at which point a ‘sense of self' emerges as a function of those historical accumulations and how they encounter, or relate to, the organism’s present time environment.
Figure 16(c): The emergent ‘I' is a function of the complex data which underpin it, and its encounter with its (present time) environment
Not surprisingly, the ‘Emergent I' contains all those ego states which went into its creation: the Parent, the Adult (and Little
Professor) and the Child. However, almost all of that cumulative,

interpretative experience is unavailable to conscious inspection, because of what I will call the "cloud of unknowing"; or the
"floorboards of the mind". It is virtually all permanently stored in the "basement". But it guides our every (conscious and nonconscious) thought, feeling and action, in dialectical interaction with a present-time stimulus.
Figure 17: What I am, in all the detail established earlier, is almost totally obscured in the non-conscious stores of my brain/mind
So, in summary, that may be what I am: an emergent phenomenon, predicated upon a body, and based upon a highly complex mass of cumulative, interpretative cognitive-emotive experiences, of very specific (good and bad) classificatory varieties
(GNP, BCP, BA, etc); interacting with a present time environment
(and sometimes a past time[s] environment [in my mind], in
[mainly non-conscious but sometimes somewhat conscious] memory).
This realization obviously makes the processes called ‘counselling’ and ‘therapy' very difficult indeed. But what is clear is that it has to be about relationship; and especially the power of present-time relationship to heal the damage of past time relationships. It also has to be about cumulative, interpretative cognitive-emotive stories. So in the next chapter, I will attempt to show how I resolved my problems with my story of relationship, especially my relationship with my mother, using Cognitive Emotive Narrative
Therapy (CENT).
~~~

Zen Postscript
The ‘self’ described in this chapter is the self of modern science and
Western philosophy. It is not the ‘self’ of Zen Buddhism and
Eastern philosophy 124 . The ‘self’ of Eastern philosophy is a felt self, much like the core self in Damasio (2000); and quite unlike the autobiographical self. (The Eastern ‘self’ is also a theoretical entity, like the Christian concept of the ‘soul’). Wisdom about the
‘transcendent self’ of Eastern philosophy has normally been passed down though oral traditions, rather than via literature, and I think that is the best way to deal with that tradition. I do introduce some of my therapy clients to the Zen perspective on the self, but, because this can be abused by individuals who are operating from their ‘bad wolf’ side, I no longer teach this tradition in textual form.
That explains the exclusive emphasis in this chapter on the ‘self’ of
Western science and philosophy.
~~~
Key learning points
As before, you may have identified particular points that were most important for you. I have identified the following points, reflecting my perspective:
(a) For therapists and counsellors: The emphasis in Freud on the neuroses arising out of the psychosexual stages of development seems to me to be a cul-de-sac, compared with the Object Relations perspective on disruptions of the relational bond between mother and baby, and later father and baby. Distortions of the individual’s ego through power struggles, with parents, siblings, and peers, also seem to be fruitful areas for investigation in counselling and therapy. Also, the fact that the ‘individual’ is really a social animal, with internalized ‘strange loops’ representing its own felt experience of encountering and being changed by objects; plus loops derived from its observations of and reflections upon its model of mother, its model of father, etc.
The concept of the cognitive-emotive ego space, which is a dialectical overlapping and interactional space – which has grown up on the foundations of the cognitive-emotive mother interpenetrating the (originally, wholly) emotive baby - is also a useful model to have when considering just ‘who’ is this client sitting before me?
124 Freke, T. (1999) Zen Made Easy. New Alresford, Hants: Godsfield Press. Pages
14-16. And:
Watts, A. (1962/1990) The Way of Zen. London: Arkana/Penguin. Pages 26-27.

(b) For individuals interested in self-help and personal development: The question of ‘who am I’, in Section 5, seems to be the most important element of this chapter for individuals who want to work on themselves. As long as you are not clear just ‘who’ you are, it is likely that you will malfunction in your relationships with others, and your relationship with yourself. What can you learn from exploring this question, as laid out in the text? And how can you continue this enquiry in your own life?
(c) For counselling and psychotherapy students: If you are a student on a counselling course at Diploma level or above, then you need to be working on developing a good grasp of the history of human thought on the development of the human mind. This chapter contains a brief review of the philosophy and psychology of human development, from Plato, though Kant, to Piaget, Bruner and
Vygotsky; and back to Freud and the Object Relations theorists.
Later, there is a review of the way in which Transaction Analysis can be used to conceptualize the internalization of the mother and father by the baby’s mind. And, finally, Section 10 explores how the (conscious and non-conscious) mind emerges from the complexity of internalized (cognitive-emotive) relationship experience. This material should be helpful in your challenge to build a ‘model’ of the client’s mind, which you can discuss with your peers and your tutors.
~~~
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