and John Dennison2
(1)
Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago School of Medicine, Wellington, New Zealand
(2)
Department of Anatomy, Otago Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand
Consciousness of personhood, or individuality
Is its localization accessible?
The mystery of self-awareness
Lecture
Gentlemen!
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.
The first distinguishing hallmark of each human is undoubtedly the social environment in which he grows up. Living examples have always been the most effective means of education, the more so when they combine with the obvious implicit authority of parents towards their child. Family life of parents is indubitably imprinted as the ultimate stamp on the child, his intellectual personality, and his future character. Consciousness of personhood thus includes all those properties arising as instinctive regularities in the social environment in which each individual grew up and lived. These properties include notably all those so-called character traits, which develop in specific ways in each family environment, according to whether it was a more brutal or a more refined ‘temper of life’ [Ed], and on which depend the predominance of more egotistical or more altruistic objectives of a person’s future actions. Such characteristics can also develop quite strongly, even where the most powerful, even half-instinctive method of child-raising, the spoken word, cannot be used, as witnessed for example in deaf mutes.
Possession of language itself must in some sense be associated with awareness of personal identity, insofar as it reflects the style of the environment in which each individual has lived. The variety of language used by different nations has a special place within ‘intellectual property’ [Ed] differing from that used almost everywhere else, despite similar consciousness of the outside world and of the body’s physicality. Within one and the same population there may be differences in dialect, which remain with an individual throughout his life and betray where he has lived. An individual’s entire style of speech, which differs quite markedly according to the manner of his upbringing, and his level of intellectual development, adds to the evidence of personalized consciousness. Through language, the entire mental acquisition of an adult, and not only of each individual but of countless generations whose intellectual heritage he has encountered through language, is transferred to the child’s brain. This is done with a certain logical order and structure, somewhat comparable to skill on a musical instrument, yet not complex enough to be considered as virtuoso performance. Orderly, logical thought and all finer intellectual operations undoubtedly have their main roots in the comprehensive yet traditional art of language. It is therefore also distinctive of the complete mindset of each individual—the language handed down from parents, whether poor and rough for a person of lowly status, or rich and more refined from highly educated parents. The altered manner of speech found in those with mental illnesses indicates a change in their intellectual personality.
If we disregard the child-rearing medium of speech, then everything that an individual otherwise learns is from instruction and what is handed down—the sum of all knowledge—which he adsorbs as part of his personality. When we speak of a person’s memory we understand mainly the sum of his acquired knowledge; at least we usually examine memory by inquiring about such acquired knowledge, and a person’s ability to recall it, compared to what is accessible for most normal people. The sum of such skills or knowledge varies widely, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, depending on each individual’s developmental processes. I need not explain the quantitative differences in more detail. Qualitatively it is so great because knowledge gained in early stages of education consists mainly of a series of associations devoid of any deeper connections—historical facts, memorized sayings and songs, the Ten Commandments, and even multiplication tables. As long as more new knowledge is acquired, it is assimilated into the existing repository of information, and is further refreshed and reinforced in memory. However this is not all of equivalent value since a child’s brain is distinguished by its ability to retain what has been learned, and the knowledge needed and most commonly made use of early in life. Reading and writing usually belong to temporary acquisition of knowledge, although the acquired associations of letters with speech—associations that are often interrupted remarkably by focal lesions of the brain—are laid down very firmly.
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