Free will and other preverbal ideas

As deduced by developmental psychologists, fetuses and infants experience their environment as fully comfortable, safe, blissful and harmonious, that they are exclusive, the center of the world, perfect, glorious, invulnerable, inconvincible, all-powerful and with free will, have no boundaries in space and time and are one-and-the-same with their mother and one-and-the-same with all reality. 

With the help of a good-enough mother we can overcome the unrealistic parts of those preverbal ideas. But it is an enormous project and often a life-time job, hampered by imperfections in the genetic makeup and early child-mother relationship. To one extent or the other, we often keep some of our preverbal ideas alive at the visible level or push them back deep down into our subconscious, with its indirect consequences. 

In practical life we can find preverbal ideas as expressed in certain convictions and behaviors. A very powerful ruler may slide back into baby behavior. A mother may suppose that she perfect and feel she’s failing when not. An athlete or a president may envisage to be inconvincible and become disappointed with realities of the sports field or the political arena. 

In spiritual and religious circles the feeling of being one-and-the-same with everything is cherished, or the preverbal images of omnipotence, perfection and glory are projected in a god. Scientists search for a perfect, all-encompassing theory. People may imagine exclusivity and glory into their groups, organizations, communities, ideologies, religions or sports teams. Readers like texts that are comfortable. Stories and movies may be popular for the perfectly beautiful female star who dreams of finding an inconvincible, glorious hero to live a life of eternal comfort and harmony.

See for instance ‘The Psychological Birth Of The Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation’, the long-term empirical study of mothers and infants by developmental psychologists Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406900380.html