On the matter of a centrality of a mother’s love, I would go as far as to say that most if not all mothers have the conscious intention of loving their babies. Yet one of the major findings of science is that many of the underlying processes involved in love operate at rapid time frames, unconsciously, at levels beneath awareness. For this reason, the relational psychobiological mechanisms that underlie mutual love can best be described by integrating observations and data from neurobiology and psychoanalysis, the science of unconscious processes. Toward that end, rather than describing love as an ideal mental state, I will suggest that love is embedded in a basic evolutionary mechanism located in the early developing emotion-processing right brain.
| Allan Schore, The Development of the Unconscious Mind