ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the baby's early lived experience, specifically on the origins and early development of the sense of self, of the person as a doer doing with others. It delineates developmental events that intersect and build toward the individual's sense of an agentic self. The upshot of these developmental processes is a sense of self that is embedded in bodily experience, intersubjective relations, and a historically determined cultural environment. The chapter highlights a few developmental processes inherent in the emergent sense of self that subsequently play a significant role in the approach to therapy and the understanding of the basis of effecting positive change. It discusses that the effectiveness of these early processes in fostering an emergent, enlivened self in early life may be enhanced or diminished by positive or negative occurrences in subsequent development. Postulations of a balance between agency and relatedness as aspects of self development already have an extensive history in recent analytic theory.
