Subjectification of the Internal Other in Self-Awareness

Abstract Book of the 19th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences

Year: 2026

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Subjectification of the Internal Other in Self-Awareness

Shigeo Sahto

ABSTRACT:

Numerous researches have provided insight into the involvement of others in self-awareness, which is shaped by mutual interaction between the self and others. Sartre’s “look” of the other provides objectivity reducing the individual to a mere factual object in self-awareness. Human existence is not just for-itself to escape being-for-others: the others, however, exist in exteriority, outside the subject of the self with being “absolutely other” (Levinas, Humanism of the Other 26). Mead argues that the self is formed in line with society’s expectations and norms through interaction with others. The “generalized other” (Mead, Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist 154), which is a reference to social norms, exists prior to the self and is in the exterior of reflective consciousness. Wallon suggests that the “internal other (autre intime)” (Wallon 103) plays a crucial role in the emergence of reflective awareness, as it mediates the development of self-perception within the realm of interiority. The image of the other is formed and internalized in a reflective narrative of the other’s actions and the perspectives. The current study discusses how the internalized other evoked in the internal or the private realm constitutes the duality of the subject with coexistence of the self and the imagined other and is involved in self-awareness.

Keywords: Internal Other Self-Awareness