AtD, p. 846 "as if each were a part of each other"

[Mark Kohut]

p. 846   "said goodbye as if each were a part of the other"...all were Family, as we say inadequately now..........In Michael Powell's 1937 film, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_of_the_World, about a traditional isolated community on a Scottish island, which has to decide whether to leave or face dying out---which I highly recommend---Powell has a woman actually FEEL the leaving of another separated in distance.
   
  'their embrace had happened long before"---
a closeness that did not need formality, even words and gestures, to exist....

  This is what a tradition in Social Psychology has called "the generalized other" or 'internalization':
"In developmental psychology, internalization is the process through which social interactions become part of the child’s mental functions, i.e., after having experienced an interaction with another person the child subsequently experiences the same interaction within him/herself and makes it a part of his/her understanding of interactions with others in general. As the child experiences similar interactions over and over again, s/he slowly learns to understand and think about them on higher, abstract levels. Lev Vygotsky suggested that mental functions, such as concepts, language, voluntary attention and memory are cultural tools acquired through social interactions[citation needed]."  wikipedia
  [Misc. I believe it is Vygotsky who stated the aphorism, 'the map is not the territory']
  
G.H. Mead (who coined "generalized other"): that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" (Mead 1982: 5). Wittgenstein on 'forms of life"--no 'private language'? (citation needed)...
  
Linguistic root of "consciousness" is con-scienza, "shared knowledge".
  
In a controversial book entitled "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", by Julian Jaynes, 1976, Jaynes argued that an individual consciousness (of oneself; of many human creations) did not exist in people in certain ancient societies: Jaynes and Daniel Dennett countered that for some things, such as money, baseball, or consciousness, one cannot have the thing without also having the concept of the thing.......

  MK: such as the concept of 'saying goodbye' and 'embracing' in one's mind.
   
  A condition of society where alienation has no meaning? Where modernity has not separated each from each. [Kai--help with naming this?]...


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