Although Goldstein (1995) present ideas by Mahler and Winnicott regarding infancy and fused self-object, a different perspective is that, infants possess inborn awareness of the mother (p. 131, 134). This is because speaking from personal experience as a mother, one can hypothesize that infants have a sensitive sense of mother from birth, infants can differentiate a mother’s smell from those of others, and infants are sensitive to brightness although they have limited vision. One can also hypothesize that infants have some ability to track moving objects at close range, infants appear highly sensitive to pain, from the very beginning.
