The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

No longer can we be satisfied with a life where the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. Our hearts must know the world of reason, and reason must be guided by an informed heart.

Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it .

The good enough mother, owing to her deep empathy with her infant, reflects in her face his feelings; this is why he sees himselfin her face as if in a mirror and finds himself as he sees himself in her. The not good enough mother fails to reflect the infant's feelings in her face because she is too preoccupied with her own concerns, such as her worries over whether she is doing right by her child, her anxiety that she might fail him.

Not only is our love for our children sometimes tinged with annoyance, discouragement, and disappointment, the same is true for the love our children feel for us.