Intersubjectivity

Framing Intersubjectivity

In its early usage within psychology, the term intersubjectivity was often seen as a mutual process; the focus was on engagement and reciprocity between two subjects, each understanding and being understood by the other as a subject. Today, however, the term is often used rather individualistically to refer to one person’s understanding of another. Intersubjectivity is placed within the individual, inviting problematic internalist explanations of how it emerges and how it develops.

Intersubjectivity During Infancy and Early Childhood

Within the context of the cognitive revolution against behaviorism in the 1960s and 1970s, claims that infants could be intersubjective were quickly challenged and almost immediately transformed into questions of whether individual infant cognitive capacities could allow various aspects of the claims. Intersubjectivity became not only an individual achievement but also derivative of intellect. Although the term was considered acceptable for use when infants were 9–12 months—referred to as secondary intersubjectivity—the idea that infants 2 and 3 months of age were engaging in primary intersubjectivity, that 2-month-olds had conversations with people, and that intersubjectivity itself emerged from innate motives for companionship, was received with intense skepticism. In the decades since then, however, attitudes have changed within developmental science and also within psychoanalysis.

Today, the idea that 2-month-olds can perceive and respond to the attentional, intentional, and emotional qualities of others’ actions is seen as unremarkable. Studies using communicative perturbations have shown that 2- to 4-month-old infants detect violations of communication and respond with distress. Other studies have shown that even neonates prefer faces that look directly at them; furthermore, by 4 months of age, the occurrence of mutual gaze leads to different brain waves and, by 5–6 months, to enhanced word learning and gaze following. Infants as young as 5 months (and even 3 months with training) can detect the goal directedness of an adult hand in its persistent approach to an object. Adults’ intentions to pick the infant up, expressed by the adult’s approaching arms, are responded to even by 2-month-old infants with appropriate postural adjustments of their bodies.

Intersubjective engagements from birth seem to reveal a continuity of development. By the end of the [Page 1208]first year, early dyadic engagements with adults and simple triadic engagements involving everyday objects in the house lead to more complex triadic engagements. Simple following of others’ gaze to distant objects develops into pointing to objects to request it (protoimperative pointing) or to show it (protodeclarative pointing) often with alternating gaze to the other person’s face. By the second and third years of life, greater linguistic and conceptual skills result in clear evidence of inference and deduction by children. Experimental attempts to ground intersubjectivity in various embodied processes and skills in the first few months of life seem to point to an increasing mutuality and to intersubjective continuity in development. Some argue that these continuities are apparent—by their absence—in developmental disorders such as autism, although evidence for patterns of early symptomatology in autistic spectrum conditions is still being gathered.

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