Which two interconnected concepts does Carson McCullers develop in this
excerpt from "Loneliness... an American Malady"?
The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and
again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects
around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes pristine wonder.
Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being
solves. Indeed, it is this self-consciousness that removes us from lower
animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting
emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of
those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and
the world in which he finds himself. After the first establishment of identity
there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of
separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the
