Thus, as John Locke somewhere says,16 if we cut off a finger, we have not diminished the self. The body is not the self. An early critic of my book pointed to the well-known fact that mirrors were used far back into antiquity17 and therefore such ancient 16 But see Locke’s profoundly modern discussion in Essay on the Human Understanding, II:10-29.
17 Exactly the significance of such mirrors is a question. In the archeological museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I have seen an ancient tombstone with the outline of a lady holding such a mirror. Would this be vanity? Were mirrors hand idols which were common in bicameral Mesopotamia? The mystery of the use of mirrors in Mayan iconography should also be noted, as it usually represents a god or the brightness of a god. See Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986).
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peoples were conscious. But we don’t see our selves in mirrors, although we say so; we see our faces. The face is not the self.
Because of the importance of this confusion and its frequency in misunderstanding my book, I would like here to describe a few other studies briefly. When presented with mirrors, most fish, birds, or mammals react with complete disinterest or else engage in social or aggressive displays or attack their mirror images. But humans and chimpanzees are different: they like mirrors. Human children go through four stages of behavior with respect to their mirror images. At first there is little reaction, then smiling, touching, vocalizing as if it were another child, then a stage of testing or repetitive activity while observing the mirror image intently, and then, when the child is almost two years old, the adult reaction to the image as if it were its own.18 The test for this final stage has been to smear rouge on the child’s nose and then have the child look in a mirror and see if the child touches its nose — which it readily does by age two.19
But the real interest in this phenomenon began when Gallup showed that the same effect could be obtained with chimpanzees.20
Chimpanzees after extensive experience with mirrors were put under deep anesthesia. Then a conspicuous spot of red dye was daubed on the brow or top half of an ear. Upon awakening, the chimpanzees paid no attention to the markings, showing that no local tactile stimulation was present. But when a mirror was provided, the chimpanzees, who by now were very familiar with their mirror images, immediately reached for the color spot to rub or pick it off, showing they knew the mirror images of themselves.
Other chimpanzees that had had no experience with mirrors did not react in this way. Hence it was claimed that chimpanzees have selves and self-recognition. Or, in the words of one of the major 18 J. C. Dixon, “Development of Self-recognition,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1957, 91:251-256.
19 B. K. Amsterdam, “Mirror Self-image Reactions Before Age Two,” Developmental Psychobiology, 1972, 5:297-305.
20 G. G. Gallup, “Chimpanzees: Self-recognition,” Science, 1970, 167-.86-87.
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senior figures in animal behavior, “the results provide clear evidence of self-awareness in chimpanzees.”21
This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The chimpanzees in this experiment and the two-year-old child learned a point-to-point relation between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is. Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed on the body without a mirror. The animal is not shown to be imagining himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting in any sense — all signs of a conscious self.
This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made even clearer by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner’s laboratory.22 Essentially the same paradigm was followed with pigeons, except that it required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, whereas the chimpanzee or child in the earlier experiments was, of course, self-trained. But after about fifteen hours of such training when the contingencies were carefully controlled, it was found that a pigeon also could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its body which it could not see directly, though it had never been explicitly trained to do so. I do not think that a pigeon because it can be so trained has a self-concept.
From Affect to Emotion
The new spatialized time in which events and experiences could be located, remembered, and anticipated results not only in the 21 Donald R. Griffin, “Prospects for a Cognitive Ethology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1978, 4: 52 7-5 3 8.
22 Robert Epstein, R. P. Lanza and B. F. Skinner, “ ‘Self awareness’ in the Pigeon,”
Science, 1981, 212:695-696.
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conscious construction of a self, but also in a dramatic alteration of our emotions. We share with other mammals a not very orderly repertoire of affects whose neural substrate was evolved long ago by natural selection into the limbic system deep in the brain. I wish here to mention three: fear, shame, and mating. And in doing so I wish to forewarn the reader that terminology is again a problem, particularly in this area — even the word affect, which I do not like to use because it is so often confused with effect and sounds strange to the nonprofessional. By affect, psychology means to designate a biologically organized behavior that has a specific anatomical expression and a specific biochemistry, one that dissipates with time. But with consciousness, all this is changed.
I shall call this consciousness of a past or future affect an emotion, as that is how we describe it. And what I am proposing here is a two-tiered theory of emotions for modern human beings as distinguished from bicameral man and other animals.23 There are the basic affects of mammalian life and then our emotions, which are the consciousness of such affects located inside an identity in a lifetime, past or future, and which, be it noted, have no biologically evolved mechanisms of stopping.
From Fear to Anxiety
In fear, there are a class of stimuli, usually abrupt and men-acing, which stop the animal or person from ongoing behavior, provoke flight, and in most social mammals produce specific bodily expressions and internally a rise in the level of catecholamines in the blood, such as adrenalin and noradrenalin. This is the well-known emergency response, which dissipates after a few minutes if the frightening object or situation is removed.
But with consciousness in a modern human being, when we 23 Julian Jaynes, “A Two-tiered Theory of Emotions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1982, 5:434-435, and also “Sensory Pain and Conscious Pain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1985,, 8:161-63.
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reminisce about previous fears or imagine future ones, fear becomes mixed with the feeling of anxiety. If we wish to make echoes here of the James-Lange theory of the emotions, we would call anxiety the knowledge of our fear. We see a bear, run away in fear, and have anxiety. But anxiety as a rehearsal of actual fear partially occasions the emergency response at least weakly. It is man’s new capacity for conscious imagery that can keep an analog of the frightening situation in consciousness with a continuing response to it. And how to turn off this response with its biochemical basis was and I think still is a problem for conscious human beings, particularly with the resulting increase in catecholamine levels and all its long-term effects. I would ask you here to consider what it was like for an individual back in the first millennium B.C. to have these anxieties that did not have their own built-in mechanism of cessation and before human beings learned conscious mechanisms of thought for doing so.