Lecture 7

Abstract

With the overview that I have given you of two great areas of awareness—of the environment and of our own corporeality, we have by no means exhausted the content of consciousness; those areas are just the first foundations of awareness we share with animals, albeit with quantitative differences. Higher mental development of humans must start from these fundamentals, but extends far beyond them: It sets sail—so to speak—from the point where these basics have already been acquired. The normal unfolding of mental development results in the formation of a ‘personality’ [Ed], or an individuality. An unconscious individual, who we choose as a subject for our study, must regain consciousness of his own personhood before we can consider him to be fully reconstituted: That is, he must remember not only that he has the same body as before his accident, but has remained the same in terms of his whole mental status. A prerequisite for ‘consciousness of personhood’ [W], which we should now consider in detail, is the possibility of development of an ‘ego’ [Ed]. The main condition for this is the possible existence of an unchanging sense of corporeality, in contrast to the ever-changing environment, as we have already seen. As soon as a child begins to operate with the word ‘I’ [W], constraints are felt from these facts. If mental development were cut short before this time, the outcome would be an imbecile who would speak of his body in the third person. Awareness of personhood therefore includes everything that you tend to understand linguistically as intellectual ‘property’ [Ed] and intellectual acquis [Ed]—everything introduced to the child through teaching, education, and child-rearing, so that the individual infant can be transformed into a person.