ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the role that smell—the scent of the other—might play in helping or hindering children to develop a feeling of belonging to a new family. It shows how children removed from their birth family can form this feeling of belonging when the smell of the caregiver is foreign and unfamiliar and competes with any olfactory memories that might have developed previously between birth mother and infant. A mismatch of smells may well hinder the child’s feeling that she can belong to a new family and may also draw attention to the biological difference between the child and her carer. A. Schore suggests that olfactory communication occurs between the mother’s and infant’s right brains and that “the processing of olfactory/gustatory information is dominant in the perinatal period”. The mature brain has two distinct memory systems each with different functions, one situated in the right prefrontal cortex, the other in the left prefrontal cortex.
