The touched self: psychological and philosophical perspectives on proximal intersubjectivity and the self

Abstract

Is minimal selfhood a build-in feature of our experiential life (Gallagher 2005; Zahavi 2005, 2014; Legrand 2006) or a later socio-culturally determined acquisition, emerging in the process of social exchanges and mutual interactions (Fonagy et al. 2004; Prinz 2012; Schmid 2014)? This chapter, building mainly on empirical research on affective touch and interoception, argues in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that surpasses such debates, and their tacitly "detached," visuo-spatial models of selfhood and otherness. Instead, the relational origins of the self are traced in terms of fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, such as the amodal properties that govern the organization of sensorimotor signals into distinct perceptual experiences. Interactive experiences with effects both "within" and "on" the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., skin-to-skin touch) are necessary for such organization in early infancy when the motor system is not as yet developed. Therefore, an experiencing subject is not primarily understood as facing another subject "there." Instead, the minimal self is by necessity co-constituted by other bodies in physical contact and proximal interaction.