D eveloping through R elationship s Origins of communication, self, and culture Alan Fogel University of Utah g p HARVESTER r i S WHEATSHEAF New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore First published 1993 by Harvester Wheatsheaf Campus 400, Maylands Avenue Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire, HP2 7EZ A division of Simon & Schuster International Group © 1993 Alan Fogel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission, in writing, from the publisher. Typeset in lOpt Ehrhardt by The Midlands Book Typesetting Company Printed and bound in Great Britain by BPCC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-7450-1195-0 (hbk) ISBN 0-7450-1196-9 (pbk) 1 2 3 4 5 97 96 95 94 93 C o n t e n t s Preface vii Part I: Communication processes 1. Introduction and perspective 3 Relational perspective 4 Developmental perspective 5 Cultural perspective 6 About this book 7 2. The origins of communication, self and culture 10 Guiding principles 11 Communication, self and culture in infancy 15 Proposals for a relational perspective on infant development 24 3. The communication system: co-regulation and framing 26 Co-regulation 29 Consensual frames 36 4. The communication system: history and metaphor 43 Systems and interdependence 44 Metaphors in social and developmental psychology 52 The fundamental problem of being-in-relation 60 5. A model of communication: meaning and information 64 Discrete and continuous models of communicative information 64 Information in continuous process communication systems 71 Part II: The relationship processes 6. The formation of relationships: creating new meaning 85 Models of relationship formation 85 vi Contents Creativity in relationships 89 Conclusions 97 7. The formation of relationships: differences between dyads 101 Processes of self-organization within relationships 102 A dynamic model of consensual framing in relationships 105 The formation of differences between relationships 109 Conclusions: two patterns of relationship formation 114 8. The self in relation: embodied cognition 119 Embodied cognition 119 Participatory cognition 122 Imaginative cognition 125 Infant cognition and its development 128 9. The self in relation: self and other 139 The dialogical self in adults 140 The dialogical self in infancy 142 The dialogical self is co-regulated 153 10. Culture as communication: stability and change 160 Culture as a process 160 Culture and infancy 163 11. Conclusions and implications 177 Developmental determinism and indeterminism 177 Forms of information: morality, aesthetics and affiliation 180 Research approaches to relationship development 187 Bibliography 193 General index 222 Name index 225 P r e f a c e I began to consider the study of relationships as an intellectual vocation in 1970, the result of two years of college teaching that was part of my work as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in Bogota, Colombia. After another year I began my doctoral training in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago, working on Kenneth Kaye’s mother-infant communication studies and struggling to fill the gaps in my knowledge of developmental psychology left by undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics and mathematics. I am still struggling, as I believe all professionals struggle, with incompleteness and ambiguity, wavering between conviction and uncertainty. The work that follows is part of an ongoing learning process. Apart from what I have said about these limitations in the body of the text I can also add that it feels finished enough for now, ready for public scrutiny, but open to revision in the future. This book is the product not only of the year over which the writing took place, but also of the past twenty years of my professional development and of my personal life histoiy. Part of this life history is my relationship with many individuals who have in some way contributed to the production of this book. The most recent are those who were generous enough to give the time to read and critically review earlier drafts: Farrell Burnett, George Butterworth, Steve Duck, Jacqueline Fogel, Donna Gelfand, Wendy Haight, Penny Jameson, Kenneth Kaye, Andy Lock, Barbara Rogoff, Rudolph Schaffer and Esther Thelen. I accept their support and critiques with gratitude. Sandy Sommer’s capable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript was invaluable. I recognize the more historically distant but no less influential contributions of my teachers and mentors, especially Kenneth Kaye, Starkey Duncan, Dan Freedman and John Knobloch. In addition, the graduate and postgraduate students with whom I have worked, the colleagues whose ideas I borrowed and those I reviewed, the subjects who participated in my research, and my parents, brothers and sisters, vii viii Preface wife and sons are all part of me, therefore implicated in the work, and entirely without blame for its faults. I am also grateful for the support of the universities in which I have spent significant amounts of productive time - in reverse and roughly chronological order, the University of Utah, the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Groningen (Netherlands), Purdue University (Indiana), Nagoya, Kobe and Hokkaido Universities (Japan), the University of Chicago, Universidad Javeriana (Bogota), Columbia University, and the University of Miami — and for the major sources of financial support that have been necessary to sustain my research efforts: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Salt Lake City July 1992 For Jacqueline P a r t I Com m unication p r o c e s s e s C h a p te r 1 Introduction and perspective The purpose of this work is to address the problem of how individuals develop through their relationships with others. Both individuals and relationships, in the perspective taken here, are never fully defined; they are always dynamically constituted as part of a process. This process is described from three points of view - communication, self, and culture - each of which is conceptualized as an aspect of development through relationships. Communicative connections to other people are fundamental to the workings of the human mind and self, and to the culture that enriches and sustains our spirits and achievements. The study of personal relationships has historically been in the provinces of philosophy, theology, art and literature. Contained in this cultural heritage are eloquent and passionate expressions of what I view as fundamental in relationships, insights I can only remind the reader about with considerably less poetry. More recently, the study of personal relationships has expanded into the late nineteenth-century scholarly upstarts of psychology, communications, sociology, linguistics, anthropology and the newly bom field of cognitive science. I offer this work at a time when the research and writing on personal relationships is already expansive and due to explode with new energy and productivity. It is therefore opportune to unite the historical insights about relationships with the profound contribution of scientific thought in the twentieth century: the concept of the dynamic open system. The task I set out to accomplish is to describe relationships and their contributions to individual selves that is both humanistic and scientific, both philosophical and psychological, both literary and technical. As a field that bridges both arts and sciences, the study of personal relationships provides both intellectual challenges and deep personal gratification and I hope this is communicated through the writing. I try to show that an attempt to comprehend the human mind and self that is not grounded in a theory of personal relationships may sprout and grow 3 4 Introduction and perspective but is unlikely to yield edible fruit and attractive flowers. Human cognition and the sense of self are fundamentally and originally relational. Relational perspective Throughout the work I contrast an objectivist perspective on individuals and their development with a relational perspective. The objectivist tradition of Plato and Descartes is the basis of our current scientific methodologies. It is the view that perceptions and cognitions are characterized by their contents, contents that are more or less a direct copy of the way the world is structured. The cognitive contents are believed to be freed from the context in which one learns about the world. I refer to all such objectivist models as discrete state models of communication, self, cognition and culture. This work is one of several recent attempts to examine the implications of an undue reliance on objectivist thinking in various domains of scholarship. I believe that cognition and perception are not mirrors of reality, but relational processes that reflect the ways in which we have experienced the world. Our initial cognitions and memories are in the form of direct action procedures, as the noted Swiss epistemologist and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out. Babies know objects because they are graspable and because of the texture, shape and color that can be perceived with the sensory' systems of their bodies. Knowledge and memory are therefore encoded cognitively, not as representations of the abstract physical properties of objects, but as the form of the relationship between the individual’s perception and action. I trace how such embodied cognitions in infancy lead to a sense of self and to the characteristic process of human cognition that never escapes its fundamental relational embodiment, even in the midst of the most abstract thought. The human mind and sense of self must also be understood as evolving out of the historical process of personal relationship formation between the self and other individuals. Upon close examination, one finds that the workings of the mind and the ways in which we perceive and understand ourselves is remarkably like the form of our personal relationships.