I first wrote about the You-I Event in my doctoral dissertation at Syracuse fifty years ago. At that time, Jean Piaget seemed to have the last word on infancy. After three years of teaching at the University of Houston, I immigrated to Israel, training as a tour guide. During a spell in the brig for refusing to serve in the West Bank, I discussed the You-I Event with my cellmates, as described in a chapter of Confession from a Jericho Jail. I had no inkling, though, of the post-Piaget revolution in infancy research. I discovered this when I chanced upon a book called The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Daniel N. Stern). It took me twenty more years before I was ready to publish.
My earliest essay provided the basis: The You-I event: On the genesis of self-awareness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Vol 12(4), Dec 2013, 769–790.
The second essay explored how the structure of experience changes when a child starts talking with herself as if she were an other: Heidegger and the infant: A second-person alternative to the Dasein-analysis. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol 34(4), Nov 2014, 257-274.
The third essay sought the origin of time-consciousness in the You-I Event: The interactive Now: A second-person approach to time-consciousness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol 47(2), 2016, 156- 182.
The fourth paper was Cogitor ergo sum: The origin of self-awareness in dyadic interaction (Human Studies , Vol. 42, 2019, 425–450).
The fifth paper was Locating the ‘inner’ in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 30, Numbers 1-2, 2023, pp. 191-214(24). It is open access.
All five essays develop the basic idea: You attend, therefore I am. Philosophy Meets the Infant is their culmination.
English 
Deutsch 
Español