Let’s Go Back to When You Were a Baby

This chapter examines how the capacity for empathy or sympathy is formed in settings where affective communication takes place. To intuit the essence of human relationships, it is necessary to elucidate not only the emergence of linguistic communication but also that of affective communication. The chapter focuses on the sensory world of infants and young children, particularly phenomena such as contagious crying, where distinctions between self and others’ bodies are not yet clear, and practices like co-sleeping between mothers and babies. It explains the generation of shared experiences, termed entrainment, through phenomena such as synchronization of breathing rhythms and differentiation between short and long breaths, occurring between mothers and babies. Furthermore, it delves into the formation of pre-linguistic affective communication through the imitation of babbling between infants and caregivers, elucidating the generation of a sense of voluntary movement felt in one’s own body by becoming aware of the zero kinesthetic.