Louise J. Kaplan Quotes

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Adolescence Babies Childhood Children Energy Fathers Giving

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.

Louise J. Kaplan

Ambition, Emotional, Order

42 Copy quote
Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents--these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures--are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teacher, Real, Avid

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Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teenager, Childhood, Adolescence

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Special, Desire

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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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.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Children, Moving

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Simon & Schuster

5 Copy quote
We humans, once we have become emotionally invested in a homeplace, a prized personal possession, or, especially, in another person, find it immensely difficult to give them up....Because they were made at a time of life when we were utterly dependent on them, the love attachments of infancy have inordinate power over us, more than any other emotional investment.

Louise J. Kaplan

Emotional, Attachment, Giving

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The invisible bond that gives the baby rein to discover his place in the world also brings the creeping baby back to home base....In this way he recharges himself. He refuels on the loving energies that flow to him from his mother. Then he's off for another foray of adventure and exploration.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Home

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Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

Louise J. Kaplan

Powerful, Struggle, Past

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

15 Copy quote
In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Zambia, Childhood

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Fathers have a special excitement about them that babies find intriguing. At this time in his life an infant counts on his motherfor rootedness and anchoring. He can count on his father to be just different enough from a mother. Fathers embody a delicious mixture of familiarity and novelty. They are novel without being strange or frightening.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Father

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Simon & Schuster

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

Louise J. Kaplan

Father, Alternatives, Way

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Baby, Brother

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teenage, Order, Racist

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

48 Copy quote
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.

Louise J. Kaplan

Future, Past, Law

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

Louise J. Kaplan

Passion, Past, Issues

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Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Individuality, Deviance

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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What eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys fear is passivity of any kind. When they do act passively we can be fairly certain that it is an act of aggression designed to torment a parent or teacher. . . . Mischief at best, violence at worst is the boy's proclamation of masculinity.

Louise J. Kaplan

Teacher, Boys, Years

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of future generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.

Louise J. Kaplan

Retirement, Children, Dust

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Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.

Louise J. Kaplan

Strength, Time, Character

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.

Louise J. Kaplan

Dream, Art, Past

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

Louise J. Kaplan

Maturity, Order, Years

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative interaction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old.

Louise J. Kaplan

Baby, Years, Creative

Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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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.

Louise J. Kaplan

Children, Memories, Father

Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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As he walks away on his own two feet--the toddler's body-mind has reached its moment of perfection. The world is his and he the mighty conqueror of all he beholds.... As long as mother sticks around in the wings, the mighty acrobat confidently performs his trick of twirling in circles, walking on tiptoe, jumping, climbing, staring, naming. He is joyous, filled with his grandeur and wondrous omnipotence.

Louise J. Kaplan

Mother, Omnipotence, Circles

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Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

Louise J. Kaplan

Pride, Compassion, Elderly

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Born: November 18, 1929
Died: January 9, 2012
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

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