original state of heteronomy or dependency, dependency on God and on godlike parents, to eventual autonomy among peers. Mead differentiated between the "I" and the "Me," and he believed that the "I" suggested spontaneous biological drives and unconventionalized motives that might actuate an individual at any moment. Mead designated as "Me" the imagined effect of an action on others. Most of the time, most of us are Me's, for if we were not we could not relate to each other as human beings. the Me is the individual seen as an object to the I, and this is the normal state in which we interact with others. This formulation correspond's to Charles Horton Cooley's "looking-glass self" (Rosenberg, 1972, 71-72).
Cooley and Mead were writing about the development of the personality and the idea of the social self. Transmission of the culture from one generation to the next is only one aspect of the process of socialization. As individuals sort out information about the culture in which they live and about the role expectations that culture places upon them, they are also learning about their self. The self can be defined as an organization of perceptions about who and what kind of person one is. Such knowledge is not innate, for we are not born with it. Instead, such knowledge develops gradually in the individual through the same socialization experiences by which culture is learned. Self-concept is the central component of personality, and therefore the study of socialization is also the study of personality formation. The infant only gradually comes to distinguish itself from its nurturer. Sociologists cannot question the infant, so they have had to develop a plausible scenario for what happens in the development of the very young:
The neonate is totally absorbed in the nurturer-infant system. But the human mind is reflective, and at some point the infant begins to perceive itself in contrast to the overwhelming other. ...