In his autobiography, «Berlin Childhood around 1900», Walter Benjamin (2006) illustrated how children incorporate their cultural environments in processes of assimilation. In the course of these processes, children assimilate aspects of the parental home, such as the rooms, particular corners, objects and atmospheres. They are incorporated as «imprints» of the images and stored in the child’s imaginary world, where they are subsequently transformed into new images and memories that help the child gain access to other cultural worlds. Culture is handed on by means of these processes of incorporating and making sense of cultural products. The mimetic ability to transform the external material world into images, transferring them into our internal worlds of images and making them accessible to others enables individuals to develop their imaginary and to actively shape cultural realities (Gebauer, and Wulf 1998, 2018; Wulf 2002; Wulf, and Zirfas 2014).
Even at the age of one, children develop a considerable ability, though the fact that they are very active, to absorb the world around them in mimetic processes. The ability of a child’s body to move around plays an important role in this. This physical moving enables them to alter their relationship to objects in the outside world. Their perspective on the world changes as they move. This applies to the corners where the objects are perceived and even more to the changing bodily encounters with the world. The world is touched by the child’s hands and often by the child’s whole body. As they gradually feel their way around the world children experience two things. One is the active child’s experience of touching the objects. But it is also the discovery that, through the act of touching, the world itself replies. Children now feel the differences in material objects and at the same time experience the world outside them. This dual experience of touching objects and being touched by them is of central importance in the development of the very first elements of a sense of a child’s identity. The child now has the dual experience of being active and passive at the same time, an experience which characterises mimetic processes. Children touch the world and are touched back by it. This becomes a cyclical process of mutual discovery, and I cannot overstate how important this is for the development of the child’s imaginary.