The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.
It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
The fact that grief takes so long to resolve is not a sign of inadequacy, but betokens depth of soul.
I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.
There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.
Creativity consists in maintaining a key aspect of the experience of childhood throughout one’s life: the capacity to create and recreate the world. Creativity is the omnipotence of the child’s mind.
Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.
The capacity to still feel wonder is essential to the creative process.
It is in playing, and perhaps only in playing, that the child is free to be creative.
We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.
It’s only too easy to idealise a mother’s job. We know well that every job has its frustrations and its boring routines and its times of being the last thing anyone would choose to do. Well, why shouldn’t the care of babies and children be thought of that way too?
I don’t mind saying in advance that in my opinion jealousy is normal and healthy. Jealousy arises out of the fact that children love. If they have no capacity to love, then they don’t show jealousy.
It’s a poor thing to be sane!
Play, like dreams, serves the function of self-realization.
There is for many a poverty of play.
The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without bieng frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of wierd theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge.