In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.

These same experiences make of the sequence of life cycles a generational cycle, irrevocably binding each generation to those that gave it life and to those for whose life it is responsible. Thus, reconciling lifelong generativity and stagnation involves the elder in a review of his or her own years of active responsibility for nurturing the next generations, and also in an integration of earlier-life experiences of caring and of self-concern in relation to previous generations.