In which case the question becomes: what brings about the unification that will, by the age of three years or so, become the child’s normal state. Presumably it is not imposed from outside (although, as Sherrington suggests, other people’s expectations may well play an important part). Instead, the infant has somehow to learn to be a single Ego. He has—literally—to self-organize the parts of his mind into a single whole.
How is this is done? There are not many answers out there, so I dare mention my own. I believe it is a matter of the components of the mind, which are initially relatively independent, being dynamically linked as participants in a common enterprise. Rather in the same the way that the divisions in a factory become part of the same business because they are jointly contributing to manufacturing the final product that will go on sale, rather as members of a band come to be bound together as an artistic unit because they are jointly creating one work of music, so the components of your mind become united as your Ego because they are involved in the common project of creating your singular life: steering you—body and soul—through the physical and social world.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
