ABSTRACT Among the classics in
symbolic interactionism we find A. Smith, C. H. Cooley and G. H. Mead.
Smith is
commonly remembered for his idea of the invisible hand, rather than his
ideas
on sympathy or moral sentiments; Cooley for his idea of the
looking-glass self,
in the sense of self-reflection, rather than self-feeling; and Mead for
how we
through attitude taking become selves with minds, rather than with
emotions. In
this paper Mead’s thinking on self-formation is perceived from a
perspective
that focuses on emotion. Especially, Mead’s idea on emotional
experience as a
felt inhibition of our interchanges with the other is examined. As a
result, a
systematization of the logic behind Mead’s theory of the evolving
self is
presented. Three distinct forms of Mead’s most well-known notion
– taking the
attitude or role of the other – come to the forefront: (1) functional
identification (2)
self-feeling, and (3) self-reflection.
By examining Mead’s symbolic interactionism from a perspective
that focuses on
emotion I whish to bring the body and the emotions back into the field
of
symbolic interactionism. The aim is, also, to present an understanding
of body
and emotion as social.
Introduction
We
do live or at
least should live in the shadow of the death. You have probably heard
the
statement before. I will, however, reformulate it. As I see it, we do
live or
at least should live in the shadow of the fact that we are born and die
alone.
Saying this, I do not mean that others are not or cannot be present
when we
come into this world or when we leave it. What I am trying to say is
rather
that when we are born it is our body
that is born, not the body of another person, and when we die it is our body that dies, not another’s. I am,
then, referring to the idea that we are existentially identical only
with
ourselves. This idea is central within classic symbolic interactionism.
As I
see it, the thinking of George Herbert Mead, the portal figure of
symbolic
interactionism, is all about the idea that life, at least, the life of
mind,
self and society, is to overcome our existential loneliness by
different ways
of communication, by trying to understand and be understood by each
other.
Accordingly, life is not about the solitude of our biologically given
bodies,
but about creating and recreating a community with others. Such a
community is
dependent on common experiences that make it possible for us to
identify with
each other. A bit paradoxically, it is our biologically given body that
enables
this sort of identity – a functional identity. In its most
primitive sense
functional identity is to do the same things as others do, to perform
the same
bodily attitudes or the same tasks as others. Contrary to our
existential
identity, we are only functionally identical with others. According to
Mead
([1938] 1972; 1982), it is within the act – the process in which
we co-exist
with others within the outer world – that we acquire a functional
identity. In
my interpretation, he means that it is our functional identity, rather
than our
existential identity, that is the foundation of the inhibition of the
act.
The
inhibition of the act is
central to the symbolic interactionism of Mead in many different
aspects. Among others it enables (1) self-feeling and (2)
self-reflection – the
capacity of being an object to oneself, a minded self within society
(Engdahl
2004, chapter 3, and chapter 6). Within the discussion of the symbolic
interactionism of Mead or his theory of self-formation as dependent on
communication with others, scholars usually tend to ignore the sort of
inhibition of the act that Mead understands as a function of
self-feeling –
emotional experience. Reading Mead from a perspective that focuses on
emotional
experience, however, the centrality of both functional identity and
self-feeling as the foundation of self-reflection becomes evident. If
the two
former forms of sociality is neglected it is not possible to grasp his
idea
that “(w)e must be others if we are to be ourselves” (Mead
[1924-25] 1981:
292). Accordingly, three different forms of Mead’s most
well-known notion –
taking the attitude or role of the other – come to the forefront;
(1)
functional identification, (2) self-feeling, and (3) self-reflection.
These
forms of sociality or attitude taking provide us with theoretical tools
to
explain our social transformation from biologically behaving organisms
into
emotional and reflective persons (Engdahl 2004: chapter 3; chapter 6).
As we
will see, Mead explicitly points out the inhibition
of act or problematic social
interchanges as the key to self-feeling,which he means is the content of the
self, and self-reflection which he
understands as the structure of self. At the same time, he emphasizes
that our functional identity is the foundation of
the inhibited act.
First, I will discuss the
idea of attitude- or role-taking in form of functional identification.
Second,
I will discuss the idea of attitude or role-taking in form of
self-feeling.
Third, I will make some concluding remarks, which elaborate the idea of
attitude or role-taking in form of self-feeling and show its relation
to
self-reflection. By examining Mead’s symbolic interactionism from
a perspective
that focuses on emotion I whish to bring the body and the emotions back
into
the field of symbolic interactionism. The aim is, also, to present an
understanding of body and emotion as social.
Functional
identity
In
the beginning
there is no mind, self, and society. In the beginning, there is the act
–
co-existing human organisms that are dependent on each other to enable
an
individual membership of a society of minded selves. When Mead talks
about the
act as the “primitive unit” (Mead 1982: 27) or “the
unit of existence” (Mead
[1938] 1972: 65) he has human interdependence in mind. “[T]he
individual
reaches his self,” Mead ([1934] 1967: 233) writes, “only
through communication
with others, only through the elaboration of social processes by means
of
significant communication, then the self could not antedate the social
organism. The latter would have to be there first.”
What
is typical of the human social organism, (or the human biological organism within
the act,)
is that it has the ability to communicate in ways that involve
participation in
the other, the appearance of the other in the self or functional
identification
with the other (Mead [1934] 1967: 253). Indeed, our ability to
influence
ourselves as we influence others or to converse with significant
gestures is
built upon, to quote Hans Joas ([1922] 1996: 183), “communication
via gestures
that does not presume the prior existence of boundaries: namely,
symbiotic
unity or identification.”It is
through
this sort of communication that we acquire a social or common structure
of
responsive gestures to outer and inner stimuli. Symbiotic unity or
identification should, thus, not be confused with the idea that it
would be
possible to be existentially identical with the other. It should rather
be
understood as the ways in which we instinctually are synchronizing our
bodily
movements with those of others, and, thus, develop common structures of
social
behavior or a functional identity. Though our body takes the same shape
as
another they are not one and the same body (compare Miller 1973: 14f.).Accordingly,
our sameness has not so much to
do with the fact that we are “physiologically differentiated
relatively
slightly” (Mead [1934] 1967: 238), but with the fact that our
physiological
makeup works in ways that enables the incorporation of common or social
structures of habitual responses to certain stimuli.
To
describe what is meant by habitual responses, Mead ([1934] 1967: 15) writes,
“[t]he offering
of a chair by a person of good manners is something which is almost
instinctive.” Our habitual reactions look “almost
instinctive” since they, like
our innate responses, are “non-intentional” (Bales [1966]
1998: 122).
As long as the act of
offering a chair to a person is completed without any complications,
there is
no awareness of it as good manner. It is simply done in relation to
others,
without the inhibition necessary for being self-conscious, in this
case,
conscious of the self as well mannered. Still, our habitual reactions
provide
us with corporal images of our past within the act – of certain
expectations on
self and society – that enables the inhibition of the act. The
difference
between truly instinctive acts and habitual reactions is that the
former is
automatically triggered by specific social situations, whereas the
latter
allows for something happening between stimulus and response –
the inhibition
of the act. When Mead writes that “[i]t is characteristic of the
child that it
does not inhibit but follows the first current that opens,”
(1982: 30), and
that “[i]nhibitions are not well worked-out in the case of the
baby. He cannot
stop himself” (1982: 40), he refers to the newborn’s lack
of a developed social
structure of habitual responses, against the background of which the
act can be
inhibited.
As I
understand Mead,
our functional identity or social structure of habitual responses is
the link –
to borrow the words of Tim Ingold (2000: 3) – “between the
biological life of
the organism in its environment and the cultural life of the mind in
society.”
To illustrate the
process in which we acquire
habitual reactions or a functional identity Mead uses, for example,
“mob-consciousness”:
«We get
illustrations of that in what we term mob-consciousness, the attitude
which an
audience will take when under the influence of a great speaker. One is influenced by the
attitudes of
those about him, which are reflected back into the different members of
the
audience so that they come to respond as a whole. One feels the general
attitude of the whole audience. There is then
communication in a real sense,
that is, one form communicates to the other an attitude which the other
assumes
toward certain part of the environment that is of importance to them
both»
(Mead [1934] 1967: 253).
However, it does not take
extraordinary experiences like mob-consciousness to catch up in each
other’s
motion, share a certain rhythm and focus of attention. Within the act,
we are
continuously engaged in this sort of joint travel back and forth in
space.
Someone laughs and we begin to laugh. People around us are happy and we
become
happy. Emotional communication is almost infectious. Mead argues:
«In your
relations to other persons, it is your own hostile attitude to the
other person
that is your evidence of his hostile attitude toward you. Change that takes place in
yourself is an
indication of the attitude in the other. [—] The child finds itself
in a
situation in which those about it are unhappy and it is itself unhappy.
The
child’s social weapon is its cry. It is advantageous for the
child to cry when
it is in a situation where others are unhappy. This situation in the
surrounding company is one which is dangerous to the child, and we have
the
response, the natural explanation from the evolutionary point of view.
The
suckling process is the natural response to the cheerful attitude. You
have a
series of attitudes which call out responses. These so-called expressions
represent the beginnings of social acts, not merely the physiological
accompaniments or merely a mechanical physiological reaction» (Mead
1982: 38 f.).
With those lines Mead
illustrates our functional identification with the outer world or what
Sandra
B. Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois (1991: 87) calls
“primordial,
pre-personal sociality or corporal intersubjectivity of the lived body
[…].” In
accordance with Joas and Miller, they claim that “[t]his
pre-personal
coexistence is the social foundation for role taking. It is the
‘being with’
which underlies the taking of roles. Such intercorporeality underlies
the very
ability to take roles, for taking the role of the other presupposes
‘being
with’ the other” (Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991: 88).In my interpretation of Mead, it is our
functional identity or the corporal intersubjectivity of our lived body
that is
the content of the self, which we becomes conscious of through
emotional
experience or self-feeling, and which is structured through
self-refection. I
think that this is what Mead has in mind when he writes the following
lines:
«We find a
great group of primitive instincts which are social in the sense that
the
responses arise in answer to indications of various movements in other
individuals of the group. That
these indications are all early stages in activities which when checked
give
rise to emotional experiences, in the individual, and answering
responses in
other members of the group. Their importance as indications of socially
important conduct is vital and has led to their selection and
preservation and
final development into the language of signs and articulate speech.
Furthermore, the earliest stage in the reflective process, the earliest
objectification
in the child and the race, has been among these social instincts, and
here the
objectification has been mediated by those early stages in the act
which
inevitably give rise to emotion, so that the content of the object is
and must
be emotional and that these indications of the on-going act have been
both the
function of stimulating the social response and indicating the import
of the
act to the individual and the socii. I would convert the
proposition and insist that
all objects whose content is emotional are selves – social
objects, for which
position the psychology of art, the theory of Einfülung would
afford abundant
illustration» (Mead, “The social Character of instinct” Mead papers, [date unknown]: 5).
As I see it, this means that
our functional identity, acquired through our inescapable adaptation to
our
social environment within the act, is what we initially become
conscious of as
the self when we take the attitude or role of the other towards
ourselves. Put
differently, self-feeling or emotional experience is consciousness of
our
socially formed bodies, rather than of our biologically given bodies.
Indeed,
our past within the act, which makes possible self-consciousness,
materializes
initially in form of our social bodies or style of flesh.
Self-feeling
Contrary
to functional identification
of functional identity, emotional experience or self-feelingimplies a break or barrier to our
immediate tendencies to act. In this way functional identification and
emotional experience are distinguished from each other. Emotional
experience
includes bodily awareness of the other and the self as different but
interrelated, whereas functional identification is a process of
corporal
sociality that lacks such sort of self-consciousness.
To understand this line of
argumentation, we must recognize the distinction Mead makes between
expression
of emotion and experience of emotion. Following Wilhelm Wundt, he
argues that
pleasure “can be a symbol only for the observer, not for the
person
experiencing the pleasure. This is an aesthetic explanation rather than
a
psychological one, representing the attitude of the individual who
stands
outside looking on. It does not explain the gesture as it arises in the
experience of the individual” (Mead 1982: 34). Contrary to Wundt
who
understands our experiences of emotion as simple results of a series of
feelings, Mead, in accordance with Dewey, understands experiences of
emotion as felt inhibitions of the act.
«One of the
differences between physical and social conduct is the emotional
content, which
is much more vivid in social conduct. As a rule, the so-called
physical stimulations are
not expressions of the emotions and do not call out responses that we
call
expressions of the emotions. Emotions arise under tensions. In social conduct
there is constant adjustment and readjustment, hence emotion.» (Mead 1982: 43).
The experience or feeling of
emotion arises only if our expression of it does not lead to the
completion of
the act – if the act collapses (Mead 1982: 40). “If a man
could strike at once
when he clinches his fist there would be no emotion, for there would be
no
checking, no inhibition,” Mead (1982: 34) argues.
According
to Mead, our
emotional experiences are not acts that we habitually perform. They
presuppose
inhibition of such activities. They are corporal evaluations of the
self from
the standpoint of the other. In my interpretation, Mead thinks that it
is with
help of such evaluations that we feel ourselves as we travel back and
forth in
space – between the concrete position of the other and the
concrete position of
the self. Accordingly, our emotional experiences are what primarily
transform
exterior to interior. Mead suggests that our emotional experiences, in
the form
of felt inhibitions of the act, make us discover “insides”
or the content of
the self (Mead [1932] 1959: 119ff.; [1938] 1972b: 143f., 186f., 212f.).
The question is what it is we
feel as the self or what the content of the self really is. My reading
of
Mead’s symbolic interactionism suggests that we should avoid an
understanding
of emotional experiences or the content of the self as sense
perceptions of the
outer world that automatically trigger innate structures of social
behavior.
The few times,
however, that Mead’s ideas on emotion are recognized it is often
treated in
this way. Chappell and Harold L. Orbach (1986: 78) write the following
when
they try to capture Mead’s understanding of emotion:
«Essentially,
emotion, as the affective side of mind or psychic activity ([Mead]
1903) that
arises from the inhibition or blocking of ongoing activity, serves to
arouse
the organism to solve the problem that is blocking the completion of
the
ongoing act. It thus serves as a motor basis for the individual’s
mobilization
of resources to solve the problem, because the solution of the problem
is what
releases the tension created by the emotional state.»
Further, they argue that
“Mead, like Dewey, sees specific emotional attitudes as
representing biological
processes that have emerged and persisted because of their evolutionary
survival value. Socialization provide customary and valued forms for
the use
and control of emotion (habits and manners, for example), but these can
break
down in extreme situations such as crowd or mob or other form of
collective
behavior, when original animal responses take over” (Chappell and
Orbach 1986:
78). In some sense this sort of perception of Mead’s thinking on
emotion is
understandable. It appears to be in accordance with, for example, his
claim
that “[t]here is of course, a great deal in one’s
conversation with others that
does not arouse in one’s self the same response it arouses in
others. That is
particularly true in the case of emotional attitudes” (Mead
[1934] 1967: 147).
But this claim is not in
accordance with Mead’s overarching aim to show that emotional
experiences are
corporal evaluations of the self from the standpoint of the other.
Recall his
claim that “[i]n your relation to other persons, it is your own
hostile
attitude to the person that is your evidence of his hostile attitude
toward
you” (Mead 1982: 38). Nor is the idea of emotion as a biological
given, which
Chappell and Orbach suggest that Mead advocates, compatible with his
belief
that the inhibition of the act felt in our emotional experiences is
made
possible only against the background of a socially given structure of
responses
or habits, in addition to our biologically given structure of
responses. Such
an argument simply points at an understanding of our emotional
experiences as corporal
awareness of our habitual expressions of emotion, which arises when
those
expressions become inhibited within the act.
To
avoid confusion,
let us consider two examples thatillustrate the idea that
the core
of emotion is a result of our interchanges with the other. More
specifically,
the examples illustrate the claim that the content of the self is an
evaluative
inhibition of the act, experienced from the perspective of the other,
on the
basis of a functional identification with the other.
The first example illustrates
the inhibitions of the act, in the form of negative evaluations:
A little boy is sitting on a
white bathroom-floor. At a distance, it looks like he paints it brown.
Getting
closer it is obvious that he is playing with his excrement. One moment
the boy
is alone in the play with his excrement. The next moment he has
company. A
tense person is running towards him. A wry face is closing in on him. A
voice
yells in falsetto. The boy is unable to continue his play with the
excrement in
the same uninhibited manner as the moment before. After repeated
interruptions
of this kind, the boy habitually avoids his excrement. His body becomes
tense –
it closes itself – in relation to the excrement. He feels
something not yet
named by him. But, the other has a name for it – disgust. The
scene of the
little boy playing with his excrement is repulsive. Playing with his
excrement,
the boy, looking at himself from the standpoint of the other,
experiences not
only the emotion of disgust, but evaluates himself as disgusting in
such a
situation.
The second example
illustrates the inhibitions of the act, in the form of positive
evaluations:
My thirteen-month-old
daughter is watching BET (black entertainment television), in the
living room.
I enter into the room, notice that she moves her body (she dances, I
think),
and hear that she makes vocal sounds (she sings, I think). I cannot
help
myself. I run toward her, with a big smile on my face, enthusiastically
clapping my hands. When my eyes meet her eyes she stops dancing and
singing.
There is silence, and then she begins to clap her hands. We are smiling
at each
other, and I start to shake my head and move to the music. She stands
still for
a couple of seconds. Then she starts to dance together with me. We have
fun. I like
dancing. I love dancing. We clap our hands again. We even scream as
loud as we
can as I turn up the volume. I then feel that it is just a matter of
time until
she will love to dance as much as I do.
The
two examples relate
to Mead’s (1982: 40) idea that “[i]nhibitions are not well
worked-out in the
case of the baby. He cannot stop himself.” In addition, it shows
that the
child, who takes the emotional attitude of the other toward the
situation that
it finds itself in, gradually becomes more apt to stop itself. When
repeatedly
taking the emotional attitude of the other towards itself in certain
situations, the child develops a structure of social behavior in the
form of
emotional attitudes. This structure makes the child approach the outer
world
from an anticipated corporal perspective. When the child’s
habitually expressed
corporal attitudes become problematic or challenged within the act,
emotional
experience, in the form of a corporal evaluation of its relationship to
the
outer world, arises. The child becomes aware of itself as standing in a
particular relationship to the outer world. In other words,
self-feeling
arises.
Concluding and elaborate
remarks
Emotional
experience is self-feeling, in the specific sense of a corporal
evaluation of the own existence
within the act. As such
the content of the self, which we become aware of as the self
when we have emotional experiences, is neither a biological nor
reflective
given, but rather it is what our bodies have become on
the basis of our functional identification with
others.
Let me elaborate on this
claim by using Young’s research on bodily comportment. In her
essay, “Throwing
Like a Girl”([1980] 1990), Young
implicitly makes a distinction between our motor acts and our emotional
experiences. Motor acts refer to abilities like walking and talking,
whereas
emotional experiences refer to the manner in which we walk and talk,
among
others. As I will suggest, our emotional experiences are strongly
related to
the style in which we with help of our motor capacities approach the
outer
world, the other, and ourselves. We could talk about our emotions as the style of our flesh, which tells who
we are.
According
to Young, the
style of the flesh is about to be or not to be. Throwing like a girl is
not to be, whereas throwing like a boy
is to be. Indeed, it seems like girls
in general embody an attitude of not
being when they throw. This suggests that they make as little use
of their
bodies as possible. Young posits that this is visible in Erwin W.
Straus (1969)
study of photographs of young boys and girls. “The basic
difference that Straus
observes between the way boys and girls throw,” Young ([1980]
1990: 145)
writes, “is that girls do not bring their whole bodies into the
motion as much
as the boys do. They do not reach back, twist, move backward, step, and
lean
forward. Rather, the girls tend to remain relatively immobile except
for their
arms, and even the arms are not extended as far as they could
be.” The motion
restriction of girls is not limited to throwing. It is shown in their
existence
within the act, altogether, Young claims.
«Not only is
there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or
less
typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging
like a
girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole
body is not
put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and
hitting, for
example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that
the
woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and
follow through in
the direction of her intention» (Young [1980] 1990: 146).
The flesh of boys tends to be
open toward the outer world, whereas the flesh of girls tends to be
closed from
the outer world.
«Even in the
most simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand, and
walk,
one can observe a typical difference in body style and extension. Women generally are not as
open with
their bodies as are men in their gait and stride. Typically the
masculine
stride is longer proportional to a man’s body than is the
feminine stride to a
woman’s. The man typically swings his arms in a more open an
loose fashion than
does a woman and typically has more up and down rhythm in his step.
Though we
now wear pants more than we used to and consequently do not have to
restrict
our sitting postures because of dress, women still tend to sit with
their legs
relatively close and their arms across their bodies. When simply standing or
leaning, men tend to keep their feet farther apart then do women, and
we also
tend more to keep our hands and arms touching or shielding our bodies»
(Young [1980] 1990: 145).
In my interpretation of
Young, the style of the flesh is acquired from functional
identification with
outer world or the other. In turn, it is the basis of emotional
experiences –
our corporal evaluations of our relations to the outer world or the
other.
Accordingly, self-feeling is constituted by corporal attitudes.
If
we are going to take seriously
the difference in corporal attitudes shown between the two sexes, our
conception of functional identification must take into account that
others
approach us differently depending on their sociocultural categorization
of us
in terms of girl or boy, woman or man, and presumably, also, in terms
of colored
or white, and sick or healthy among others. This is important to
emphasize
because we do not choose our sex, our skin color, or our health status.
More
importantly, it implies that those are not qualities that decide who we
are or
want to be. Rather, they are part of the basis on which others approach
us.
Clearly, it shows that it is basically others’ attitudes towards
us that bestow
the outer world with powers to which we become subjects (compare
McCarthy 1984:
118).
We, however, are able to change
our corporal attitudes toward the outer world or other in spite of
sociocultural categorizations. This is not easy. We are often
emotionally aware
of the style of our flesh within the act, i.e. corporally evaluate our
relation
to the outer world or the other, but we are seldom conscious of the
style of
our flesh at a reflective level of the act, i.e., incorporate it in our
answer
to questions about who we are or want to be. The reason for this is
that our
emotional expressions are usually performed in a habitual manner. As
aforementioned, it is only when our emotional expressions and
experiences
within the act are inhibited to an extent that make them problematic
for the
completion of the act, that we become conscious of them at a reflective
level.
It is at this point, communication about emotion with help of
significant
symbols, and in turn emotion-management starts.
An
example of the above argumentation is what happened when the staff at two
different
Kindergartens outside of Gävle in Sweden videotaped themselves
helping the children get ready to go out in the mornings. The
videotaping was
part of a project that aimed at gender role equality among children,
which was
initiated by the equality-expert Ingemar Gens at the county
administrative
board of Gävleborg in 1996. Before observing the videotapes the
staff was
convinced that they treated all of the children in the same manner.
During the
observations, the staff made a count of the words directed towards
girls and
directed towards boys. The final analysis showed that 80 % of the words
were
directed towards girls, and mere 20 % of the words were directed to
boys.
Difference seemed also to be displayed in how the personnel used words.
The
staff seemed to communicate with the
girls when helping them to get dressed, whereas the boys were commanded to get dressed. Nonetheless,
the communication with the girls was immediately interrupted as soon as
a boy
shouted out. In addition, the videotapes showed an episode of when a
little boy
who asked nicely for help repeatedly goes without being noticed.The boy eventually throws himself on the
floor and screams. After the staff viewed the videotapes, they realized
that
their attitudes toward the children reinforced the typical gender roles
among
them. This was consistent with earlier stuff on the children’s
communication
around the dinner table. For example, a girl was asked with words if
“someone
could pass the milk, please” and a boy said
“öhhh.” Another girl at the table
seemed to know that he wanted milk. After discussing the problem at
hand, the
staff decided to divide the girls and boys into different groups based
on sex.
Without any boys seeking attention, the girls could be encouraged to
focus on
themselves and their own needs. Without any girls being experts on
communication and understanding, the staff had to communicate with the
boys to
be able to understand what they wanted. The staff then realized that
it, for
example, takes as long time to make a boy into a cowboy as it takes to
make a
girl into a princess, and boys are in no more hurry to play
cowboy than to be dressed
up as a cowboy. The boys, certainly, did not mind as the staff
communicated
with them (Gens 2002).
It did not take long before
the changed attitudes of the staff toward the children resulted in
changed
attitudes in the children themselves:
«A pre-school
teacher came home from an excursion in the forest, and was very upset. One of the children had
devoted itself to
trample to death all the snails that they have found a lot of in a
glade. […]
– It is not the whole
world, is it? Boys
do so, was the reply to her frustration.
But it was not a boy. It was a girl»
(Gens 2002: 60, my translation).
The observations support
Young’s ([1980] 1990: 147) claim that “[t]here is no
inherent, mysterious
connection between these sorts of typical comportments and being a
female
person.” To some extent, they support Young’s idea that the
typically timid,
uncertain, and hesitant attitude of women engaging physically with
things
results “from lack of practice in using the body and performing
tasks” (Young
[1980] 1990: 147). More importantly, they show the significance of the
approach
of the other towards the self when it performs motor acts. It is, first
and
foremost, the other’s corporal attitudes that determine our
emotional selves,
if we are going to feel ourselves as timid, uncertain, hesitant, or the
opposite, as well as feminine or masculine.
The examples above are used
to illustrate that it is emotional
attitude taking that makes us into interacting human beings, who
experience
emotions, in addition to behaving human organisms, who experience
sensations or
have sense perceptions.
In turn, this implies a
distinction between our experiences of emotions, in the form of
corporal
evaluations of our relationship to the outer world or the other, and
being
conscious of those emotional experiences as a part of our selves. The
latter
only takes place if our expressions of emotion (or emotional
experiences) do
not work as means of the completion of our cooperative acts with others.
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