Portraits in Development: The Science, Art, and Philosophy of Creating What is Found

The study of human development can be said to begin from the thought of how an infant becomes a self over time out of instinct and fantasy life with the help of a maternal other. In this way, development is also a question of what is made from the human fact of dependence. The other must think the selfs dependency, meet its demands with care, and then fail in the meeting of needs so there can be disillusionment, desire, re-illusionment, and the dream of a shared reality. D.W. Winnicott insists that for the baby to become someone she must create an object that is there waiting to be found, her first not-Me possessionthe breast, the bottle, the blanket, the teddy bear, etc. The maternal other, Winnicott maintains, must accept the babys object without resolving the paradoxical quality of this transitional sway between apperception and perception. My dissertation studies human development from and between the paradox of creating what is found in infancy mirrored by the creative dilemmas of cultural experience in adulthood to examine how the adults scientific, artistic, and philosophical projects bear witness to the development of a desire to be as reflective modalities for understanding self, other, and the realities internal and external to each. My study reconstructs three portraits of the emotional world and creative ideas of an exemplary figurethe scientist, Marie Curie, the artist, James Joyce, and the philosopher, Jacques Derridaas cases for thought on the developmental tasks, respectively, of making contact with reality, symbol formation, and the achievement of a capacity for doubts about the self. I explore character development as a means of thinking human development, where crises of subjectivity give representational valence to emotional growth, to engage how one makes from human development a story of creative living.