Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present... concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we sym...bolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not p...resent to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one's own life is a case in point. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »