PSYCHOLOGY of the MANDALA part II
James Gibson (1986) suggests that the circular field of vision plays an important part in the development of a sense of self beginning quite early in infancy. With what a baby can see in his visual field, he can develop the simple awareness of himself as that which is always present. The baby’s nose is a constant, unchanging object in his visual field. His arms, legs, and trunk change in appearance as he moves. However, with experience, he can identify them, too, as things that are always there.
By coordinating what he sees within the circular field of vision with kinesthetic messages from his body, he forms a sense of himself as a physical being. This rudimentary sense of self as an object is refined through experience and maturation. Nevertheless, it seems to endure into adulthood. The feeling we have that "I" reside in my head is probably a result of this same visual information, framed in the circular field of vision. It would seem logical that this basic sense of self is our core self-image, one to which we refer often without being aware that we do so. Because the field of vision is circular, circles have become associated with this basic visual experience of our physical self.
Children’s Art
Circles appear early on in children’s art. Children’s art expression begins as random scribbling. Kellogg (1967) has documented children’s progress from scribbling to drawing circles as early as age two. By age three children learn to draw circles without scribbling and begin to assign meaning to their circular forms. By the age of three or four, children’s drawings evolve into more elaborate forms. Without any teaching by adults they spontaneously create radiant suns, flowers, mandalas, and people with arms and legs sprouting from large circular heads.
The people drawings young children make appear to have little resemblance to the human body, given our own adult perspective. They make sense, however, as a rendering of the visually based sense of self described by Gibson. Take a moment to test this yourself. Look down at your body and consider how you would draw what you see. Are not children’s drawings a surprisingly accurate image of this view? The circle is not a head, but an attempt to draw what the whole body looks like when viewed from above, framed by the circular boundary of the field of vision.
While a child’s drawing skills are developing, she is also developing a sense of herself as an agent of activity rather than as the passive recipient of others’ actions. Self-awareness that unites feeling, willing, and thinking occurs by the age of three when children stop speaking of themselves in the third person as "baby," and begin using first person words "me" and "I" to refer to themselves (Kagan, 1981). I saw this process of development unfolding when a little girl in a family art therapy group drew a circle. Apparently delighted with what she had drawn, she pointed to the circle and exclaimed, "Baby!" the name she called herself. This reflected the importance of the circle in her discovery of herself as a person, as an individual.
The suns, flowers, mandalas, and people children draw are elaborations of circles and reveal the natural occurrence of the circle as an organizing principle while children are learning about themselves and their world. Children in cultures all over the world progress from creating scribbles to drawing circles, mandalas, and people (Kellogg, 1967). This suggests that drawing circles is an integral part of the process of maturation. Drawing mandalas may even be necessary for the development of a psychological sense of self.