Robin Redbreast

Robin Redbreast
Birds can represent the fluttering, darting thoughts of intuition. This is why little birds helped Cinderella help herself.

Montessori and the Unconscious


Dr. Sigmund Freud
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  • 1914 Dr. Sigmund Freud publishes On Dreams, a 43 page, popular version of his 1900 tome,The Interpretation of Dreams. www.doverpublications.com

In India during her years as an enemy alien. 

Dr. Carl G. Jung

  • 1915 Dr. Maria Montessori comes to San Francisco to demonstrate her educational method,based upon training the senses and tapping into the unconscious to release the child's hidden potential for growth. 
  • 1948 Dr. Montessori writes that her method " seeks to observe the unconscious mind and its secrets..."
To Educate the Human Potential (p.12)
  • 1964 Dr. Carl G. Jung writes: Man's unconscious archetypal images are as instinctive as the ability of geese to fly in formation; as ants forming well organized societies; as bees' tail wagging dance that communicates the exact location of a food source. 
Man and His Symbols (p.68)
  • 1970 Marie Louise von Franz writes The Interpretation of Fairy Tales and says, on page 1: Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of the collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore, their value for scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. 
  • 1977 Bruno Bettelheim writes The Uses of Enchantment, and comments on the subject of children's moral developement: Fairy tales, proceeding as the child's mind does, help the child by showing how a higher clarity can and does emerge from all this fantasy. (p.61) And: In the traditional fairy tale, the hero is rewarded and the evil person meets his well-deserved fate, thus satisfying the child's deep need for justice to prevail. (p.144)
  • 1996 Paula Polk Lillard writes, in Montessori Today: One of the greatest new powers to appear in the second plane is the children's capacity for imagination...The formation of imagination is rooted in sensorial experience. It is the ability to picture material objects or real experiences in their absence, to see in the mind what we no longer see, to hear what we no longer hear... Because a rich sensorial experience is a necessary foundation of a fully developed imagination, Montessori believed that, in general, a concentration on reality vs. fantasy is more useful to the very young child. However, it is incorrect to assume that Montessori saw no role for fantasy in the child's life. For older children, she believed that fairy tales, myths, fables, and other uses of fantasy should play a key role in moral understanding and exploration of feelings and emotions. (pp.51,52)
Dreaming of dragons.

2002: Michael and D'Neil Duffy publish Children of the Universe: Cosmic Education in the Montessori Elementary Classroom, and write: In the second plane [of development] from about age six to twelve, children enter into society, and, through the power of the imagination, expand their circle of consciousness to the world... This power of the imagination  and the ability to abstract from what they know concretely means that children are not limited in their search for knowledge — the universe itself is the limit. (pp. 7,9) http://www.parentchildpress.com/listing.php?varcat=4&description=Cosmic+Education