Though they don’t often verbalize these things, young children seem to be searching for answers to the same questions with which adults are often concerned: What is the meaning of my life? Where is the meaning of my life?

Too often the making of meaning out of the external world with its over-emphasis on rationality, cause-and-effect, structuring and ordering which should be only one part of a child’s life-half a child’s developmental task, makes for a kind of denial of the inner world’s need for experiencing meaning. This experiencing of meaning when it is not being honored and allowed for in children can lead to psychic imbalance.

Sand play slides of children of many ages will be shown in this talk which will address this issue.

Related Workshop: The First Year: Infant Integration and the Primal Self; The Second Year: The Archetype of Separation

JUNE MATTHEWS, M.A., began her Jungian training in Zurich, later becoming a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. While in Zurich she studied extensively with Dora Kalf. She has studied with Michael Fordham in the Infant Observation Program of the London S.A.P. and in the Tavistock Clinic in London Institute for Child, Adolescent and Family Research and Therapy. She is in private practice with children and adults in Palo Alto and is on the teaching faculty of the Jung Institute, San Francisco.