Virginia Axline Quotes

Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation of color. Perhaps it's when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security. We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life.

Sometimes it is very difficult to keep in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do-- have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.

Perhaps it is easier to understand that even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behavior of another person, we can grant that each individual does have their private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of their personality.

What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?

A child is only confused by questions that have been answered by someone else before he is asked.

One need only to observe the physical response of a child to realize that, when happy, he is happy all over.

the important things are what we remember after we have forgotten everything else.

Understanding grows from personal experience that enables a person to see and feel im ways so varied and so full of changeable meanings that one’s self-awareness is the determining factor.

research is a fascinating combination of hunches, speculation, subjectivity, imagination, hopes, and dreams blended precisely with objectively gathered facts ties down to the reality of a mathematical science

...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality.

They left together - a little boy who had the opprtunity to state himself through his play and who had emerged a happy, capable child, and a mother who had grown in understanding and appreciation for her very gifted child. A child, given the opportunity, has the gift of honest, forthright communication. A mother who is respected and accepted with dignity can also be sincerely expressive when she knows that she will not be criticized and blamed.

What would ultimately help Dibs the most was not the sand mountain, not the powerful, little plastic duck, but the feeling of security and adequacy that they symbolized in the creation he had built last week. Now, faced with the disappearance of the concrete symbols, I hoped that he could experience within himself confidence and adequacy as he coped now with his disappointment and realization that things outside ourselves change - and many times we have little control over those elements, but if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us.

didn’t ask him if he wanted to go. There was no real choice for him to make. I didn’t ask him if he would like to come back again. He might not want to commit himself. Besides, that decision was not up to him to make. I didn’t say that I would see him next week, because I had not yet completed the plans with his mother. This child had been hurt enough without my introducing promises that might not materialize. I didn’t ask him if he had had a good time. Why should he be pinned down to an evaluation of the experience he had just had? If a child’s play is his natural way of expressing himself, why should we cast it in a rigid mold of a stereotyped response? A child is only confused by questions that have been answered by someone else before he is asked.

As I went down the East River Drive, I thought of many children I had known — children who were unhappy, each frustrated in the attempt to achieve a selfhood he could claim with dignity — children not understood, but striving again and again to become persons in their own right. Out of projected feelings, thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and hopes, new horizons grew in each child.

If I could get across to Dibs my confidence in him as a person who had good reasons for everything he did, and if I could convey the concept that there were no hidden answers for him to guess, no concealed standards of behavior or expression that were not openly stated, no pressure for him to read my mind and come up with a solution that I had already decided upon, no rush to do everything today—then, perhaps, Dibs would catch more and more of a feeling of security and of the rightness of his own actions so he could clarify, understand, and accept them. This would take time, real effort, great patience on the part of both of us. And it must at all times be basically and fundamentally honest.

Enter into children’s play and you will find the place where their minds, hearts, and souls meet.” —Virginia Axline, Pioneer of Play Therapy

There is no severer discipline than to maintain the completely accepting attitude and to refrain at all times from injecting any directive suggestions or insinuations into the play of the child.

What is therapy if not an examination and re-examination of the self in an effort to reorient one’s values and by honest introspection achieve insight into ways of satisfying the drive for complete self-actualization and to achieve the strength and courage to be himself?

It would have been so easy to take him in my arms and console him, to extend the hour, to try overtly to give him a demonstration of affection and sympathy. But of what value would it have been to add additional emotional problems to this child’s life?

The process of non-directive therapy is so interwoven that it is difficult to tell where one principle begins and another ends. They are overlapping and interdependent. For example, the therapist cannot be accepting without being permissive. She cannot be permissive without being accepting. She cannot leave the responsibility to make choices up to the child that she does not respect. The degree to which the therapist is able to put these principles into practice seems to affect the depth to which the therapy can go.

Perhaps he felt safer in manipulating intellectual concepts about things, rather than probing any deeper feelings about himself that he could not accept with ease.

Now that he had encountered concrete evidence of is changing world it would be important to work with his reactions to it- not with reassurance, not with lengthy explanations or apologies, not with words, words, words, thrown at him as a substitute, but with the experience he might now have to take a measure of his own ability to cope with a changing world.

He was exchanging his anger and fear and anxiety for hope and confidence and gladness.

His search for self was a tedious troubled experience that brought him increasing awareness of his feelings, attitudes and relationship with those around him. There were many feelings that Dibs had not dug out of his past and flung out in his play to know and understand and control better.

Dibs was coming to terms with himself. In his symbolic playhe had pired out his hurt, bruised feelings, and had emerged with feelings of strength and security. He had gone in search of a self that he could claim with proud identity. Now he was beginning to build a concept of self that was more in harmony with the capacities within him. He was achieving personal integration.

The feelings of hostility and revenge that he expressed towards still flared up briefly, but they did not burn with hatred or fear.

He had learned to understand his feelings. He had learned how to cope with them and to control them. Dibs was no longer submerged under his feelings of fear, anger, hatred and guilt. He had become a person in his own right. He found a sense of dignity and self-respect.

In the therapy hour—once the child has established confidence in the therapist and has accepted the therapist even as she has accepted him—he shares his inner world with her and, by the sharing, extends the horizons of both their worlds.

No one who reads this book with understanding can ever again think that human psychological growth, success in a schoolroom, or the acquisition of a complex skill can be achieved merely by overt repetition or by the reinforcement of simple patterns of response.

If you understand why you do and feel certain ways, many people believe, then you can change your ways.

I didn’t ask him if he had had a good time. Why should he be pinned down to an evaluation of the experience he had just had? If a child’s play is his natural way of expressing himself, why should we cast it in a rigid mold of a stereotyped response?

Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms.

A child is usually quick to forgive and to forget those experiences which have been negative. Unless conditions are extremely bad, he is accepting of life as he finds it, and accepting of the people with whom he lives.

He manifests in every way an eagerness, a curiosity, a great love of life that thrills and delights him in its simplest pleasures. Normally, a child loves growing up and strives for it constantly—sometimes outreaching himself in his eagerness. He is both humble and proud, courageous and afraid, dominant and submissive, curious and satisfied, eager and indifferent. He loves and hates and fights and makes peace, is delightfully happy and despairingly sad.

When an individual reaches a barrier which makes it more difficult for him to achieve the complete realization of the self, there is set up an area of resistance and friction and tension. The drive toward self-realization continues, and the individual’s behavior demonstrates that he is satisfying this inner drive by outwardly fighting to establish his self-concept in the world of reality, or that he is satisfying it vicariously by confining it to his inner world where he can build it up with less struggle. The more it is turned inward, the more dangerous it becomes; and the further he departs from the world of reality, the more difficult it is to help him.

When the individual develops sufficient self-confidence to bring his self-concept out of the shadow land and into the sun and consciously and purposefully to direct his behavior by evaluation, selectivity, and application to achieve his ultimate goal in life—complete self-realization—then he seems to be well adjusted.

There are things far more important in this world than a show of authority and power, more important than revenge and punishment and hurt. As educators, you must unlock the door of ignorance and prejudice and meanness.