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Infancy
A mother’s relationship to her infant during the first few months of life is an archetypal one. That means that baby sees the mother not as a personal mother, but as the “great mother” — the all sustaining mother earth.  The infant’s connection to the mother is very much a primal one, for he depends...
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Eighty years ago, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank theorized that when we are born, we experience a “birth trauma” that affects us for the rest of our lives.  More recently, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has created a model for understanding in greater depth the kinds of effects that birth can have upon our later lives.  He writes that...
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I fly a lot, and when I travel I see a lot of people carrying teddy bears in the airport; not just children; adults too.  Everytime I see somebody carrying one onto a plane, I think of the idea of the “transitional object.”  This term was coined in 1951 by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  It’s...
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On a typical day in America, 68% of infants (aged 0-2) are watching television.  Up to 20% of American babies have a television in their bedrooms.  That’s what a survey in the journal Pediatrics reveals.  Pediatrics is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which recommends in its media guidelines to parents that children from...
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I’m impressed with the work of  Susan Linn, author of The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World, whose organization, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), has been attempting to stop corporations from using characters like Sponge Bob Square Pants,Sesame Street’s Elmo, and cartoon movie figures to advertise everything from sugar-rich cereals and unhealthy McDonald’s “happy meals” to...
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