A man’s fatherliness is enriched as much by his acceptance of his feminine and childlike strivings as it is by his memories of tender closeness with his own father. A man who has been able to accept tenderness from his father is able later in life to be tender with his own children.

It didn’t take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love.

From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there – in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

Fathers represent another way of looking at life – the possibility of an alternative dialogue.

Normally an infant learns to use his mother as a “beacon of orientation” during the first five months of life. The mother’s presence is like a fixed light that gives the child the security to move out safely to explore the world and then return safely to harbor.

For a woman... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity – a perversion, if you will.

Paradoxically, the toddler’s “No” is also a preliminary to his saying yes. It is a sign that he is getting ready to convert his mother’s restrictions and prohibitions into the rules for behavior that will belong to him.

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction – a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.

Normally an infant learns to use his mother as a "beacon of orientation" during the first five months of life. The mother's presence is like a fixed light that gives the child the security to move out safely to explore the world and then return safely to harbor.