When a child’s self-directed experience is interrupted by the emergence of an instinctual system (when the child is hungry, angry, tired, or cold), the good parent steps in, solving the problem disrupting the child’s fragile unity or, better yet, teaching the child to solve the problem himself. When the latter process has been completed with sufficient thoroughness, the child is ready to join the social world. This must happen by the age of four, or it may never happen.2 A child must be sufficiently self-organizing to be desirable to his or her peers by the age of four or risk permanent social
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