On origins of human imagination

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

Relevant here are dynamics of the unconsciously experienced merger with the mother. When we feel to be one-and-the-same with our mother, we also experience ourselves as being her. But slowly we start noticing the boundaries between ourselves, our mother, other parts of the outside world, and between now, the past and the future. But we maintain the capacity to imagine that we are our mother, others, other parts of the world and other points in time.

In other words, through the process of separation-individuation, the already existing capacity of imagination gets transformed from the unconscious to the conscious, from the preverbal to the verbal state of mind, and from merger to distinction.