Jazmyn Soltau
This paper extends Graham Music’s argument that cultural positioning shapes the observer’s emotional responses in infant observation. Drawing on my experience of mixed-race identity, I explore how internal cultural multiplicity can form an early, lived mode of dual perception that parallels the reflective stance Music argues observers must acquire. Growing up between culturally distinct homes required continual adjustment to different emotional grammars and relational atmospheres. These shifts, often described as ‘code-switching,’ are understood here psychoanalytically as movements between internal positions shaped by early relational worlds.While all observers internalise multiple relational grammars, in mixed-race development these positions are often racially codified and socially consequential. Because such worlds are structured along unequal axes of privilege and marginalisation, their tensions are not neutral. In my experience, multiplicity became an ordinary mode of perception: sensing more than one truth at once and navigating ambiguity without collapse.Using psychoanalytic ideas of self-states, internal objects and perceptual positions, I consider how such culturally structured multiplicity both complicates and enriches the observational mind. This paper offers a situated account of how internal plurality, shaped by racialised social structures, may inform the observational stance without claiming universality.