Senses of the Self

Daniel Stern's "Self Psychology" is the central idea of The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Stern's goal is to make sense of subjective infant experience. His method is to understand subjective experience in terms of senses of self. Senses of self tie together and unify experience; they are also able to be experienced themselves. Sense of self allow the mind and brain to draw together disparate sensory modalities and their information and create an equilibrating system of affect, perception and action.

Stern argues that there are four senses of the self that coexist within normal adults and that develop in infancy, the subsequent stage building on the previous. The first sense of self is the emergent sense of the self, or that sense of self that not only unifies perceptual and affective experience but enables the experience of the process of unification. This sense of...