ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will broaden my account of embodied selfhood to argue that selfhood is fundamentally intersubjective. We develop selfhood and acquire our practical identities only through relations with other people beginning with specifi c second persons who care for us in our juvenile dependency and extending to our later mature relationships. Crucially, it is our immaturity at birth that necessitates the intimate involvement of others in the formation of selfhood. Without direct interpersonal relations of care, human infants simply die. The second-personal structure of selfhood, and our capacity to understand and communicate with one another, arises from a shared existence founded in what Merleau-Ponty calls “intercorporeity” or shared embodiment, which starts prior to birth but continues through adult life.1 These considerations lead us to the conception of selfhood as a dynamic unity of fi rst-, second-, and third-personal perspectives: I can be a ‘me’ only for a ‘you,’ and only if we are both one of the ‘they.’
