Somewhere before he is three, a child says mine for the first time.
Nobody taught him the word the way he is using it. The adults around him say you and yours. To say mine he had to take a word he had only ever heard pointed at him and turn it around, so that it pointed out from himself. He had to have a self to point from.
Where did that come from?
Maria Montessori called the child of the first three years a psychic embryo, and the term is exact. In the womb the organs form separately and then come together into one body, and the child is born. After birth the same thing happens one level up. The faculties of the mind form separately: language assembling itself out of the surrounding speech, memory, movement coming under command, will flickering into existence. Then, around the third year, they come together, and the child is born a second time. Born into consciousness. Memory consolidates into his memory. Will emerges as his will. Where there had been developing faculties, there is now a person.
What I want to add is what they come together around.
Consider what two years of a normal toddler's life consist of. He follows his sister into the next room. He picks something up. He asks for something. He climbs onto the chair, gets down, and climbs onto it again. Every one of those acts has an actor in it. He does not know that; the actor is implicit, unnamed, present in the act the way a hand is present in a handprint. But there are thousands of such acts, and every one of them carries the same actor. At some point the evidence is overwhelming, and the mind does with it what a mind does with a mass of similar concretes: it abstracts. It sets aside what differs from act to act, holds what every act shared, and attaches a word. Me. Mine. The self is a concept, formed the way Rand described every concept being formed, and its units are the child's own actions. He did not find himself by looking inward. There was nothing to look at yet. He abstracted himself from what he did.
And he did not abstract himself from nothing. Every one of those acts needed a world to do it in, and every one was done to something that answered: the sister turned around, the thing came up in his hand, the chair held. So the same mass of evidence that holds an actor also holds a world the actor is not, and the two are abstracted together, as the two sides of one line.
Be exact about what he has abstracted, because it is less than it sounds. He has not learned who he is. He has learned that he is: that there is a conscious agent here, and the acting is its. Every child's first I is the same I. It has no content yet beyond agency itself, and it is true of him the way his height is true of him, whether or not anyone had noticed. That is the birth into consciousness: a self, discovered as a fact. What that self is, in particular, is a question he has no reason to ask for another decade.
The cot
Now the failure case. Ask what it would take to starve that abstraction. Not an ordinary home, however dull. A baby on a living-room floor with a drawer to empty and a parent to crawl toward has a world to act in. It would take a world with almost nothing in it to act on: nothing to reach for, nowhere to go, no one to go to, and the few acts left, the cry and the smile, answered by no one. Nobody would run that experiment on purpose. History ran it by accident.
When Ceaușescu's Romania fell at the end of 1989, the world got its first look inside the state orphanages: wards of infants, fed and changed on a schedule and otherwise left in their cots. The wards were quiet. The children had stopped crying, because crying brought no one. Thousands were adopted abroad in the years that followed, and the child psychiatrist Michael Rutter and his colleagues followed the ones who came to England, from arrival into their twenties. Some of those children arrived with a pattern any clinic would recognize: they rocked, they did not meet the eyes of the people who came for them, they did not reach up to be held, they had few words or none, and they fixed on a sensation or an object as if nothing else were in the room. Autism-like traits, the team called them. The question those wards had put was not whether the children would be behind. It was whether, with almost nothing to act on, a self gets abstracted from the world at all.
The answer, over the next twenty years, was: it depends. It depended on one thing: whether the child got out of the cot and into a world he could act in before he was six months old or after. The children who left before six months grew up looking like English children adopted at the same age. The children who left after six months did not. Into their twenties, more of them than of the English children they were measured against still found other people hard to read, still kept to narrow interests and repeated the same motions, and still went to a stranger as readily as to their own parents.
Here is my claim about these children. From about six months on an infant is built to act: to reach, to grasp, to sit up and look, to get across a floor, to go to someone. A cot gives him almost none of that to do, and what little he can do there changes nothing. A child who cannot act on the world has less and less self to abstract, and the line between self and world never forms sharply. The pattern of traits, in these children, can be read as a result of that blurred line. The phrase people reach for is that such a child is in his own world, and the phrase is exact: the line that would have made the world a separate place, with him on one side of it and everything else on the other, was never drawn sharply. A child who goes to a stranger as readily as to his parent has not drawn the line that makes the parent his. Reading another person means knowing that he is another, on the far side of the line. And intention comes from the self. A cup is for drinking and a spoon is for eating because someone wants to drink and to eat; a child with a sharp line picks things up for what they are for, and a child without one handles them without using them, because the purpose would have to come from a self that was never sharply set apart from the world.
A word to parents of children with autism, who will recognize some traits on that list. Nothing in this post is about your home. Your child had everything the cot lacked, a floor to cross, a drawer to empty, a parent to crawl toward, and some of the same traits mentioned above came anyway. This post does not explain why, and it is not trying to. The wards show one way these traits can appear; they say nothing about the others possible ways.
One more thing in the record. The six months were a threshold, not a gradient. A harm that took a little from every month inside, from birth, would have left a gradient: a little worse at four months, worse again at eight, worse again at twelve. Instead there was a threshold. Something opens at six months, and Montessori had a name for it. A sensitive period is a mental need with a deadline: a stretch of development in which the mind is hungry for one particular acquisition and takes it with an ease that will never come again. It opens as well as closes. The period for abstracting a self opens at about six months, when the infant begins to be able to act on the world, and runs to about three. A child who is in a world he can act in when it opens abstracts a self on schedule, and whatever the cot had begun in him reverses. A child still in the cot when it opens loses, with every month, more of what a self is abstracted from; what came later came by effort, over years, and it never came quite sharp, and never quite automatic.
One level up
Give the child that world, then, and by three he has abstracted a self and set it to work; for the next several years his reason aims wholly outward, at the world in front of him. Watch what happens in the elementary years.
At the end of one school year I wrote a report that opened, "Leo is becoming a builder." The sentence was in no template. It came from a year of watching what he did whenever he was free to choose. He and a friend spent the last weeks of the year building a computer game, hours each day, until drag-and-drop design had turned into programming functions of their own. During fundraisers he engineered contraptions for collecting money: ropes, pulleys, moving parts. He built arcade games out of cardboard and hot glue, a pinball machine among them, and invited the younger children to play. On the class trip he built a shelter.
The next report began, "Nora is becoming a writer." Her year came to a point in one work: a handwritten story about a mouse and his growing company of animal friends, which she came back to week after week with no assignment behind it until it passed sixty-four pages. Everything she loved was in it. Every character was an animal, and she was the child who cared for the classroom's animals, tadpoles to chickens to the bearded dragon. And the story was one collection among many; the largest vocabulary collection in the room, well over two hundred cards defined in her own words, was hers too.
Neither child set out to be a builder or a writer. They chose, and chose, and chose again, and each choice carried the same chooser in it. The report did, from the outside, what a self does from the inside a few years later: it took a year of choices and abstracted the one thing they had in common.
These are elementary children, and that is no accident. From about the age of eight or nine a child’s choices acquire something else. Definition. I like this. I don't like that. I'm a hockey kid. I'm an animal person. I don't like her. The child is now producing, at a great rate, the kind of preference that has an I stated in it. Those preferences are not noise, and they are not a phase to be waited out. On the hypothesis of this post, they are the concretes a second abstraction will be made from.
Because in adolescence the pattern of the psychic embryo returns. Through the elementary years the elements of the self have been forming the way the faculties once formed, separately and quietly: knowledge, skill, interest, temperament, taste, conviction, an accumulating identity precipitating out of a thousand choices. In adolescence they come together, and the person is born a third time. Born into self-consciousness. The faculty that spent childhood aimed at the world turns, for the first time, on its owner: Who am I? And with that birth, identity, which had been a fact about him, becomes a need in him. No toddler needs an identity; he simply has one. The teenager has to possess his.
Set the two abstractions side by side. The first, at three, was of a metaphysical fact: that I am a conscious agent. It gave him a self and told him nothing about it. The second, in adolescence, is of a moral fact, one that is true of him and of no one else: that this particular consciousness has a particular identity. Its units are the thousand defined preferences and values of the years just before, and if he was free to act on them, the identity is there to be abstracted, and it arrives as his own, because he made it out of what he did.
The costume
Now the second failure case, and this one is written across a century of popular culture. Elvis and the rock-and-roll rebels, the hippies, the punks, the goths, the furries: generation after generation of teenagers has improvised a costume of an identity and made itself unmissable in it. Call it what it is: deprivation, of what the second abstraction is made from. Ask, as with the cot, what it would take. The units of an identity are choices, thousands of them across the elementary years, each made by the child, acted on, and answered by what happened next. So it would take a childhood with little in it worth choosing and little choosing allowed: a classroom with little in it that a child of six, or nine, or eleven is hungry for, and a day in which what might have been chosen is assigned instead, work and pace and afternoons, bell to bell, by adults. A child can spend six to twelve that way and arrive at fourteen with very little of the form I like this that he ever acted on. And where he arrives with some, look at where it comes from. The teenager who does have an identity usually has it in the one place he was given choices that counted, the team or the band or the stage, and it is usually confined to that place. The identity is as wide as the choosing was. The parade has a start date, and it fits. Before high school was universal, such a child went to work at fourteen, into a world where what he chose counted, and had at least that world to make the evidence in; high school kept him out of it, and the question arrived with nothing behind it.
The costume is what the need does when there is nothing to abstract from: a ready-made package of preferences, taken on all at once, from the outside in, in place of an identity abstracted one preference at a time from the inside out. A pseudo-identity: the sensation of being someone without the reality. The teenager was asked Who am I? on schedule, and he had no evidence to answer with, so he borrowed someone's answer whole.
That claim needs a test, or it is a sneer at every kid in black. The test is the order of events. Which came first, the preferences or the label? A child who loved dark music and horror stories for years and at fourteen found the word goth has an identity that found its name. Nothing was borrowed; the label fit evidence he already had. A child who took on the music, the clothes, the vocabulary and the friends in a single season, as a set, is wearing the package. Same word, and the opposite order of events. The subculture is not the problem. The problem is an identity put on from the outside, all at once, instead of built from the child's own preferences over years.
Where an identity comes from
An identity is abstracted in adolescence from the choices of the years before, the way the toddler abstracts a self from his acts. The toddler's is the same act, seen where it is easiest to see. The cot was an extreme, and the children were followed for twenty years, so it shows plainly what the costume shows faintly: that a self is abstracted from what the child himself did, not from what was done to him; that the material has to be laid down over years, in a window with an opening and a deadline; that a world has to supply the material; and that when the world does not, the need does not go away. It goes hungry. In the cot it had almost nothing to feed on, and the line between self and world never formed sharply. At fourteen it feeds on whatever is handed to it, and the result is the costume.
A deprivation does something else, too. It shows the condition. Nobody knew what a vitamin was until sailors who went months without fresh food lost their teeth. The deprivation showed that something in fresh food was necessary, long before anyone knew what it was. The assigned childhood is an absence of that kind, and read beside the cot it names what an identity is made of.
The condition is a world worth choosing in, from six to twelve and on into adolescence: work that meets what the child is hungry for, and the freedom to take it up, the pulley or the story or the animals, to say I like this and act on it, and to find out what each choice does. Those are the units of an identity, and they cannot be assigned. A preference chosen for a child carries the chooser's I, not his. That is what the assigned childhood withholds, and high school went on withholding it past the age at which the question arrives.
An identity is not given, and it is not found. It is abstracted from a childhood of the child's own choices, and it can be abstracted only where there were choices to make. That is where an identity comes from: a world that gives the elementary child things worth choosing and leaves the choosing to him.
This post is drawn from a book I am writing, The Achievement of Normal: Founding the Science of Human Flourishing: that a human being has a nature, that a nature has needs, and that the conditions for meeting them can be found the way the vitamins were found, by what happens in their absence. Subscribe to read it as it comes.