These representations are constantly "worked over" by apperception, which through its synthetic and diaeretic activity constructs them into ever "higher developmental forms of consciousness," such that in the end their origins in sensation and perception might be completely erased.
Or perhaps it's merely that unself-consciousness and self-satisfaction are developmental stages in some artists' lives: the enviable concentration of someone who works only for his own pleasure becomes the annoying complacency of someone who thinks that the same solution will always please.
See Gallagher (2005) for the connection between the developmental research and phenomenological conceptions of self-consciousness.
In his powerful book The Three Secrets of Aging: A Radical Guide (O-Books, 2012) he writes: "The initiation of age, if handled consciously and wisely, creates a developmental transition that moves us from the materialistic concerns of middle age to the awakened consciousness of the Elder in winter...Aging is enlightenment in slow motion".
In 1978 Cathy took part in a developmental psychology group organised around the journal Ideology and Consciousness which led to collaboration with four others (Julian Henriques, Couze Venn and us) on the book Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (1984).
On this view, self-consciousness is something that emerges in the course of a developmental process, and depends on the acquisition of concepts and language.
He writes: "[N]o matter how much the will and the representational contents of consciousness mutually condition each other, we will nevertheless be forced by that developmental process to assign both a different meaning.
And in the simplest way of understanding the difference one might say that a state of consciousness will come and go, whereas the stage of consciousness is a developmental benchmark that you don't regress from.
Activity theory is derived from the work of Soviet developmental psychology, which emphasized the importance of cultural and contextual factors in shaping human cognitive development and consciousness.
Thus, when taken together, there is a need for studies to longitudinally investigate the development of objectified body consciousness, depression, emotion dysregulation, and NSSI during early adolescence, in order to develop an accurate developmental understanding of the objectification pathway.
