Childhood (n.) cannot tell its own instincts from its parents' will — which is why, in dreams, instinct-animals appear as attributes of the parents: the father a bull, the mother a cow.
Childhood (n.) matters not only for the warpings of instinct born there, but because then far-seeing dreams appear before the child's soul, terrifying or encouraging, that shape his whole destiny.
Childhood (n.) memory is not continuous but islands, like single lamps in far-flung darkness; the child speaks of itself in the third person until the ego-complex gains energy enough for 'I'.
Childhood (n.) invoked as the aetiological bogy is a heaven-sent escape from the acute problems of real life into blissful meadows where it is all the parents' fault.
Childhood (n.) clung to too long is childish, but it is just as childish to walk away and assume childhood no longer exists because we can't see it.
Childhood (n.) is not shaken off, only moved away from: returning later we find bits of our personality still alive in their childhood state, powerful until reunited with adult consciousness.
Childhood (n.) experience (n.) is not harmful in itself; it turns harmful only when it finds no fitting place in the adult's life and outlook.
Childhood (n.) has been inflated by the century of the child, so extravagantly praised, into a boundless expansion of the kindergarten that overshadows the creative meaning of adult life and forgets the education of adults.