He analyzes the genesis of self-consciousness as the evolution of apperception. From a complex of bodily sensations, desires, and aversions, the child becomes aware of representations in other beings, which it conceives as pictures carried around in their bodies.  As that conception joins with observed intentional activities in animals and people—i.e., actions they carry out for their own satisfaction—the “itself” arises, though in the third person. Only when such recursive phenomena are apperceived within my own body does the representation of my self arise (SW VI: 177). This bodily self, then, appears as the “gathering place” not just of my representations, but also as the “origin of all movements connected physiologically with bodily feelings”, the pole of all attraction and repulsion.